The Second Sight, page 33
“Different from what’s there now, at any rate.”
“So it would be. The Romans never got that far, did they? They would have had their work cut out for them building fountains in the Idáren Dráren.”
The chauffeur waited by the Bentley. The window shades were pulled; through the open door Christopher noticed a pillow and blanket lying on the backseat. “What I do,” Sebastian said, “is stretch out and take a nap; I’ll be home in time for dinner.”
“Have a safe journey, then,” Christopher said.
“Wait.”
Sebastian gripped his arm; there was quite a lot of strength in his hand, small as it was.
“I’m sorry about the surprise,” he said. “It was what Zarah wanted and I didn’t see how I could interfere. You’re quite a romantic figure to her, you know. Catherine’s responsible for that, rest in peace.”
3
AS A CHILD, BEFORE SHE KNEW WHO HE WAS, ZARAH TOLD CHRISTOpher, she had invented him. In her reveries her father told her wonderful stories. He told her that the dinosaurs were the most beautiful creatures in the history of Creation, that they were not naked reptiles with scaly dull skins as scientists thought, but glorious animals covered with plumage, like their cousins the birds. Feathers of every conceivable hue and pattern kept them warm at night and cool in the daytime sun. In some cases these were attached to the triangular objects along their spines and tails that paleontologists had mistaken for armor plates. When they were pleased or excited, whole herds of dinosaurs opened their plumes in unison, like enormous peacocks, but with majestic slowness because of their great size, so that the emerald plain where they grazed was transformed into a vast tapestry of the loveliest colors ever seen on Earth.
After Wolkowicz came she began to gather facts. He gave her the book of Christopher’s poems and other books describing conditions in Chinese prisons. She tried to live as she imagined Christopher was living. She slept on the floor, ate only rice and vegetables, wore the same clothes every day, spoke only when spoken to, imagined that the walled house in which she and her mother lived was a prison that she was not free to leave.
“Actually, it was a cloister,” she said. “Mother lived the life of a nun after the two of you parted. She had a strongbox full of relics. Barney had taught me how to pick locks, so I was able to get into it.”
“He taught you to pick locks?”
“Yes. And how to open letters, write in invisible ink, follow people, shoot his pistol. He knew everything, and everything he knew was interesting.”
Cathy kept her papers under her bed in a heavy, old-fashioned, brass-bound strongbox. It opened with the key she had taped to the back of a drawer in her writing table—one of the spy’s tricks that Wolkowicz had taught Zarah, who soon found it. The documentation of Cathy’s life did not amount to much—two dozen photographs of herself, her parents, and various horses; her diplomas from school and college (because of her face and her music, she had graduated with honors from both places); a dozen letters from Christopher; their French marriage certificate, written in copperplate and sealed with a gob of red wax; bills from Salvator Mundi Hospital in Rome. In a cunningly concealed secret compartment in the lid, Zarah found some blurry photographs of Christopher which Cathy had made surreptitiously in the course of her detective work. They showed him talking to a woman on the Via Veneto, telephoning from a kiosk, sitting in a café with an Oriental who had two expensive cameras draped around his neck. There was more: a long dark hair from a woman’s head, a cigarette smeared with lipstick sealed like criminal evidence in stiff brown envelopes.
Also Cathy’s wedding ring and engagement ring, sealed inside a separate envelope. Zarah was wearing the former, a circlet of diamonds and rubies. She held up her hand, fingers outspread. “I’m sure you recognize this,” she said. Christopher did not reply. “I liked your letters a lot,” Zarah said. “They were written from all over the world, from places that don’t even exist under the same names anymore—Leopoldville, Salisbury, Saigon. I wrote out my own copies and hid them under a rock in the desert, so I could read them over and over again. Even as a child, I saw that there was a lot you weren’t telling Mother. I knew by then that she had left you because you didn’t love her.”
Christopher stopped walking. Zarah had to raise her voice to be heard above the sudden roar of traffic beneath their feet. They had arrived on the Dumbarton Bridge over Rock Creek Parkway, a whimsical structure designed by its architects to resemble a Roman aqueduct, but with four heroic sculptures of North American bison at the approaches. Annoyed by the noise, Zarah took Christopher’s arm and led him off the bridge, back the way they had come, into the quiet shade of Q Street.
“I hated her for that,” she said. “I still do. I had a right to be your daughter. What right did she have to take you away from me? Or me from you?”
“It may not have been as simple as it seemed when you were little,” Christopher said. “All your mother wanted was love.”
“That’s all anybody wants. But most people don’t go into hiding in the Sahara Desert for the rest of their lives if they don’t get it on their own terms.”
“Maybe she needed it more than other people do.”
“More than you?”
“I don’t know about that, but the blame wasn’t all hers.”
Zarah was still holding his arm. She dropped it and took a step backward. “It’s very strange,” she said, “that after all these years you’re the one I’m talking to and she’s the one who’s dead. What’s even stranger is, you’re just as I imagined you and I can hardly remember her at all.”
Christopher flinched at these words and turned his eyes away.
“You didn’t like hearing that, did you?” Zarah said.
“No. Not at all.”
“I didn’t think you would; I didn’t think you’d like some of the other things I’ve told you about myself. But I wanted you to know the worst about me from the first moment. I’ve held nothing back. That’s as bad as it gets, but the demonstration’s over. I won’t do it again.”
She was looking at him with the same frank intelligence that he had noticed in the first moment. It was very strange after so many years to be in the presence of someone else who looked and behaved so much like himself.
4
“YOU’RE PERSUADED THAT THIS STRANGE WOMAN IS YOUR NATURAL daughter?” Stephanie Christopher said. “You make her sound like a Brontë character,” Christopher said.
“I make her sound that way? There may be a vivid imagination mixed up in this situation, but it’s not mine. What are we supposed to tell Lori? ‘Oh, by the way, sweetheart, we’ve just discovered that you have this glamorous sister who’s been hiding out in the Sahara Desert for twenty-three years, galloping Arabian horses across the sands. And do you know what? She looks just like Daddy!’ ”
They were in the kitchen at the back of the house. Even though they were alone behind a closed door, even though she was trying to provoke a quarrel, Stephanie spoke in a low voice. Zarah had declined to meet the brunette wife and child she had seen in the photographs on the piano until Christopher prepared the ground; the little girl, Lori, had gone to bed. Stephanie, who was herself young enough to be Christopher’s daughter, was a professional psychotherapist who spent her days dealing with the havoc wrought on the educated classes by real or fancied parental lies, concealments, and betrayals. She was worried about the effect on Lori of Zarah’s sudden appearance. So far, by following stringent rules of behavior based on prevailing theory, she and Christopher had avoided doing serious psychic harm to their child. But what would happen now?
“I don’t like this situation at all,” Stephanie said. “What right does Sebastian Laux have to bring this person into our house and vouch for her? How does he know, really know, that she’s who she says she is? Why does he trust his information?”
“He describes the case as circumstantial. But it has the ring of truth.”
“So you keep on saying. You’re convinced by a physical resemblance, by the history of your family. You want to be convinced. Your mother has come back.”
“Stephanie, that’s mumbo-jumbo.”
She smiled a patient professional smile. “If you say so. I can certainly understand why you’d give Sebastian the benefit of the doubt. Why not? All he did was conspire to keep the secret of your child’s existence from you for almost a quarter of a century before showing up in his Bentley on a fine Indian summer day with a picnic lunch and this starlet on his arm. Look at you now.”
“What do you see?”
“A changed man.”
“I’m just the same.”
She gave him a look filled with deep feminine skepticism. “Sure you are.”
That morning when she kissed him goodbye he had had the look of a man who has come to terms with a troubled past and been cured of its disorders. She had seen love in his eyes, love for her, love for their pretty, brainy little girl, and she had thought, as she drove Lori to school, that she had made him happy where everyone else had failed. Now the past had come up the front steps and started to take him back.
“You look absolutely bewildered,” she said.
“There’s some reason for that, Stephanie.”
“There sure is. What are you going to do about it?”
“We agreed to take the medical tests and abide by the result.”
“ ‘We’? I notice you don’t use her name. Why is that?”
“Maybe I think you don’t want to hear it. It’s a strange name for a Christopher. Anyway, Zarah and I will go to the doctor and have blood drawn tomorrow. According to Sebastian they can compare DNA and see if we’re a match.”
Stephanie, who held an undergraduate honors degree in microbiology as well as a Ph.D. in psychology, spoke with authority within the family on scientific matters. “Sebastian is right,” she said. “Whose idea was it to take the blood test?”
“Zarah’s. She wants all doubt removed.”
“And a blood knot tied by science. How terribly Teutonic. And if you do match up, then what?”
“Then we tell Lori and everyone else the truth, accept Zarah as a member of the family, and go on with our lives.”
“Go on or go back?”
“Go back? Where to?”
“To childhood, to Berlin. To the land of lost content. Wasn’t it more interesting there?”
“It was interesting, all right. But Stephanie, I can’t erase it.”
“I know that. But you don’t have to regress, either. Sane poople live in the present.”
Christopher smiled at her intensity. “I’ll do my best to hang on to my sanity,” he said.
“Good luck.”
Stephanie feared the past as someone who has been revived after nearly drowning fears the ocean. She was the daughter of a spy, and as a student she had belonged to a secret group that played at revolution; she had lived in a make-believe underground in Dostoyevskian squalor and dementia; she had cut sugar cane in Cuba as a member of the Venceremos Brigade. Like Cathy, she hated secrets, but her reasons were different; because she had overheard real ones while playing with dolls at the feet of her father’s agents and invented others while playing revolutionary, she knew that secrets were usually fraudulent and almost always uninteresting. They withered when exposed to light. She had chosen psychology as a profession because it made her an enemy of secrets. She pursued them relentlessly in her consulting room, identifying them, exposing them, robbing them of their power. In her life with her husband and daughter she insisted on unvarnished truth, on revelation, on the same fierce self-criticism that had been required of the members of her revolutionary cell. Christopher understood how she felt and what she wanted, and he tried to give it to her. But after ten years of daily interrogation by earnest Chinese inquisitors, he knew how utterly impossible it was to achieve a state of understanding by relying on the confessions of human beings.
“The past is not a good place for anybody,” Stephanie said. “Especially you.”
“I agree. But now I have this visitor from there. What am I supposed to do about it?”
“You’ll have to figure that out for yourself. What attracts you to her? Apart from her facial features and the ties of blood and family, I mean.”
“She knows things I don’t know.”
“She does? What, for example?”
“She knows all about her own existence, to begin with. She may know other things. I’ve been taken by surprise. I thought I knew the whole truth about myself, and now I know I never did.”
As a young woman Stephanie had worn the long lank hair of her rebellious and distrustful generation, and now she shook her head as if to fling these vanished tresses from her eyes, the better to peer at Christopher.
“I see,” she said. “And how do you feel about that?”
Her hands were folded on the table between them. Christopher touched the hollow of her wrist and felt the tension coiled within it.
“I feel curious,” he said. “Interested.”
“How curious? How interested?”
“Like old times.”
“I don’t like the sound of that.”
Stephanie rose to her feet and went upstairs. After a moment Christopher heard the shower running. Before following her he cleared the table and washed the dishes.
When Christopher joined Stephanie in bed half an hour later, she was wide awake, wearing her glasses. Usually they both read before going to sleep, but the book she was working on, a thick biography of Fidel Castro, lay unopened on her stomach.
“I wasn’t being absolutely honest with you downstairs,” she said. “I’d like to clear that up before we close our eyes.”
No misunderstanding or resentment was permitted to survive past nightfall in Stephanie’s house.
“All right.”
“The fundamental fact is,” Stephanie said. “I’m jealous because Zarah is a female and she’s young and good-looking. If a prodigal son turned up from your past I’d feel different. I’m sorry, but I’m human, and there it is.”
“So am I, and I don’t intend to give her up or give in to your jealousy. It’s ridiculous. She’s my daughter.”
“She may be your daughter, but remember that she’s been dreaming about you all her life. There’s risk involved, Paul. Be careful. This is a romantic young woman with an Oedipal fixation.”
“Really?”
“Really. She’s been fantasizing since childhood, but now she’s in the presence of reality. Reality includes hormones. The incest taboo is a matter of conditioning and she’s missed out on that. It will be amazing if she doesn’t fall in love with you. Is that plain enough for you?”
“It will do. Even if everything you say is true, don’t you think I’m a little old for her?”
“Are you? I’m only ten years older than she is.”
“The cases are not quite the same. She seems to be a perfectly nice girl, Stephanie. You may even be friends after you get to know her.”
“In spite of what my instincts tell me, that’s my plan, assuming that she doesn’t turn out to be an enemy, but it won’t be easy. Does she really look just like your mother?”
“Yes. It’s startling. When I first saw her I really thought that was who she was. I spoke to her in German.”
“Good grief. But how could you think such a thing? She’s a young woman.”
“So was my mother the last time I saw her.”
Stephanie turned off the bedside lamp. After a moment Christopher’s eyes adjusted to the wavering light that shone in the window from the street, and he saw that his wife was near tears. This was a rare event.
“It’s not your mother I’m jealous of,” she said. “I want you to understand that.”
“I do.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
She relaxed a little. He gathered her into the hollow of his body. Her hair was damp and her skin smelled faintly of hypo-allergenic soap from her bedtime shower. Stephanie never wore perfume or make-up; that much, together with her contempt for bourgeois reticence, remained of her radical convictions.
“I hate jealousy as much as you do,” she said. “My mother used to laugh about Cathy’s jealousy behind her back. I’ve never been jealous of her, God knows. You didn’t love her, no matter how beautiful she was. Even as a kid I understood that. After I grew up I realized that she was a not-very-bright borderline personality who had no emotions of her own and attached herself to you so she could use yours.”
“That’s harsh,” Christopher said.
“No, clinical. I just forgot about her; so did you. But now her daughter turns up, looking just like you even though you say she looks like your mother. It’s a shock.”
Christopher did not attempt to correct the errors in this analysis. Looking down into Stephanie’s solemn face, he smiled in spite of himself. Her dogged searches through the cupboard of her own mind, and everybody else’s, endeared her to him. Seeing the expression in his eyes, she began to kiss him; her anxieties nearly always turned into ardor after she had explained them to herself.
Later she said, “I’d just as soon wait to meet her until the blood tests come back. I don’t want any shadow of doubt showing in my eyes.”
“Who’s going to tell Lori?”
“You are. After the tests come back. And then we’ll have a party for her. The Patchens, my parents, the O. G. if he’s up to it—all the romantic figures from your world that she’s heard so much about.”
Except Wolkowicz, Christopher thought.
Stephanie always slept soundly after making love, and soon she was breathing contentedly in the half-dark beside Christopher. He lay awake for a long time, and when he woke from a dream of Germany at four o’clock in the morning he was not sure, for long moments, where he was. There was nothing unusual about that.
5
ON THE DAY THE BLOOD TESTS CAME BACK, AFFIRMING THAT THEY were father and daughter beyond any reasonable scientific doubt, Zarah and Paul Christopher went for a walk along the Mall. He arrived first at their meeting place, the Smithsonian station of the Metro. He and Zarah had already spoken on the telephone about the laboratory report, so they said nothing more about it as they rode up the escalator together. Still grinning in delight over the news, she was otherwise undemonstrative as they sauntered toward the dome of the Capitol. Other monumental buildings, pillared and porticoed or sheathed in glass, stood to right and left with American flags flying from the roofs; elms in their autumn colors glowed on every hand under a sky of cornflower blue. It was a day of surpassing beauty, and Christopher realized that Zarah was acutely conscious, as he was, that the two of them were figures in this captivating landscape.
