The Second Sight, page 35
“Mother and some of the men her age were strung out nearest the oasis,” Zarah told Christopher, “and when the chase was over they decided to go back to camp and spend the night there. We younger riders were nearest to the ostriches, so we stayed where we were, with the idea of having another chase in the morning. We did, in the opposite direction from the oasis, so we slept out a second night. When we got back to the oasis the camp had been attacked. They were gone.”
“All of them?”
“Every one. The terrorists shot the horses and camels, too.”
Stephanie had been listening with deep attention. “You’re sure it was terrorists who did it?”
“Who else could it have been? Desert people don’t massacre each other for no reason, and they certanly don’t kill animals instead of stealing them. These scum train in that part of the Sahara sometimes. We found Land Rover tracks and hundreds of empty shells with Russian markings on them.”
Stephanie recoiled slightly. “You used the word ‘scum.’ “
“I did? Do you think that’s too harsh under the circumstances?”
“I understand why you feel the way you do.”
Zarah looked at Christopher, who still said nothing, and then at Stephanie again. “Do you?” she said.
“On a certain level, yes; I think I do. I’m sorry that this happened; truly sorry. Your mother is buried over there? You didn’t bring her home?”
“Bring her home?” Zarah looked into Stephanie’s eyes with all the disconcerting candor that everyone had noticed in her from the first. “As I said, two nights passed before we got back to the oasis. The hyenas and jackals and vultures had been there before us. There was nothing to take home, not even bones. On the way home we saw some rags that might once have been their clothes blowing across the sand, a long way off. But that was all.”
Inside the house again, Zarah sat down beside the O. G., who was now eating fruit salad for dessert. Christopher had remained in the garden with Stephanie, and from where she sat she could see the two of them talking earnestly.
“I hear that you grew up with the Ja’wabi,” the O. G. said, resuming their conversation as if it had never been interrupted.
“You know about the Ja’wabi?”
“A little.”
“Not many people do.”
“I’ve been blessed with learned friends. Tell me about Meryem.”
“She’s called Lla Kahina now. Did you know her?”
“I was madly in love with her fifty years ago.”
“You too? In Berlin?”
“Yes. Why do you say ‘you too’?”
“In Hubbard’s novels somebody is always falling in love with her.”
“Ah, you’ve read the novels; that explains a lot. Hubbard was a very good reporter. But my love for Meryem was unrequited, alas, it was not to be. Meryem saw my future in the cards. She wasn’t in it, but everything else that’s happened to me was. It’s uncanny, looking back, how often she was right on the button about the details of my fate. And everyone else’s. Your father tells me she still does readings.”
“Not so often anymore. She says her powers are getting weaker.”
“I don’t believe it. You should make Paul go see her. Back in the days when I knew her she was the talk of Berlin. The Nazis wanted to kidnap her and turn her into a secret weapon.”
“They did? I’d never heard that.”
“Well, it’s perfectly true. That’s why your grandparents smuggled her out of the country in ‘39. Thereby hangs a tale.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
The table was filling up with listeners. The O. G. looked them over benevolently, but stopped talking.
“Then come and see me,” he said, leaning toward Zarah as if to murmur a confidence. “I’m in the phone book. Just call up and pop in any afternoon about four-thirty for a cup of tea. We’ll swap yarns.”
“It won’t be much of a swap, I’m afraid.”
“I’m not so sure about that,” the O. G. said. “Why don’t you make time for me tomorrow?”
7
THE O. G.’S HOUSE WAS LOCATED AT THE BOTTOM OF A NARROW cul-de-sac that ended in a bluff overlooking Rock Creek Park.
Zarah arrived there the next afternoon a few minutes early. Rain was falling; she put up the collapsible umbrella that she carried in her raincoat pocket and then, to kill time, studied the rocks and trees on the vertiginous slope below the balustrade.
When she turned around she saw a skewed figure dressed in black limping down the flagstone walk leading from the O. G.’s front door. It was David Patchen; she knew him at once. Their eyes met. Even at this distance she saw the light of recognition in his face. Or something more than that. But how after all could he mistake her for anyone else? He got into a car and drove away without looking at her again.
As she went up the walk the O. G. appeared in the doorway, a spaniel at his heels. “Come inside and sit by the fire!” he said. There really was a fire burning on the hearth in the library. The logs seethed and crackled, emitting showers of sparks. “Apple wood, straight from the Shenandoah Valley,” the O. G. said. “The real stuff!” Tea had been arranged on a table before the fire. “Sit ye down,” he said, drawing back a chair. “I’ll be Mother. How do you take it?”
“Lots of sugar.”
“Good girl. In my day young women made no bones about liking sweets.”
While the O. G. poured, Zarah examined the room. The walls were lined with shelves of books, but there were also a large number of tables and pedestals on which were displayed dozens of objects, mostly deadly weapons and ritual masks from many different cultures. “Souvenirs of heathen countries,” the O. G. said. “Brought back by friends.” His thick pince-nez were slightly askew, and he took them off, opened the spring wide, and set them straight on the bridge of his nose.
“Learned friends?”
He grinned. “Not always, as you can see. A lot of the masks are from a fellow named Barney Wolkowicz. It was sort of a joke we had between us. I hear that Barney came over the mountains on a donkey and found you and your mother in the back of beyond. Is that so?”
“Yes. It was a great surprise.”
“I’ll bet it was. Barney was an amazing fellow.”
“More amazing than I realized,” Zarah replied. “While I was waiting for the lab report I read all about him in the newspaper files at the Library of Congress.”
“All about Barney Wolkowicz? In the newspapers? That’s a good one!”
“The papers all seemed to think he was some sort of monster.”
“Barney had his moments. But speak only good of the dead.”
“It’s very hard to think of him as dead. Do you really believe he killed himself?”
The O. G. smiled with lively interest and handed her a cup of tea. “If he did, he did it up brown,” he replied.
A few months after Christopher returned from China Wolkowicz’s corpse had been found floating at the end of an anchor chain ten feet below the surface of Chesapeake Bay. The chain was wrapped around his corpulent body; the anchor had buried itself in the bottom mud. The autopsy showed that Wolkowicz’s skull had been shattered by a large-caliber bullet fired into the back of his head. The weapon that killed him was never found, nor was the vessel from which he had presumably fallen or been thrown overboard. No suicide note was discovered. Although the victim was supposed to be an officer of the Outfit, even one of its heroes, the Outfit was silent, as usual. The press was bewildered when all other departments of the government turned out to be silent as well; even Congress was silent. Official discretion on this scale had not occurred in Washington since World War II. Despite these bizarre circumstances the local coroner had ruled the death a suicide, creating a sensation in the media.
“You said you read up on Barney while waiting for a lab report,” the O. G. said. “What lab report?”
“The results of the test my father and I took to see if our DNA matched.”
“Paul told me all about that; wonderful what they can do nowadays to take the mystery out of life. Fat chance of anything like that working on Barney.” He took the lid off a sterling silver candy dish that bore the Euhemerian club seal. “I’m going to have one of these chocolates,” he said, offering the dish. “Would you like one, too?”
“No thank you.”
“Are you sure? They’re straight from the source. David Patchen was over in Brussels last week; he smuggled them through customs. Have you met David?”
“Not yet. But I saw a man answering his description leaving your house just now.”
“You’ve got a description of him?”
“From Barney.”
“Then it wouldn’t be very flattering. But David’s the one who can fill you in on Barney—he and your father. The two of them knew him best and saw him last. Wolkowicz’s later period—the breakdown and suicide and all that—was after my time.”
“What breakdown?”
“He went a little funny in the head for a while. Lots of people do when they reach a certain age in life and realize that there’s more behind than up ahead. These days they call it ‘mid-life crisis.’ Best sellers are written about it by people in New York.”
“Is that what killed Barney, mid-life crisis?”
The O. G., chewing a second Belgian chocolate, regarded her with unshakable affability.
“I don’t know about that,” he said. “He was an anchorite among cenobites.”
“A what?”
“Sebastian Laux didn’t send you tutors in Latin and Greek?”
“No. Arabic and Mandarin.”
“Then you may turn into a displaced anchorite too. It means he was a hermit monk in the midst of a religious community.”
“So was my father. Surely that wasn’t enough to drive a person like Barney to suicide.”
“That wasn’t all. If you’ve read the papers you know the hounds were after Barney; television cameras, newspaper reporters, the whole circus.”
“Why were they after him?”
“Hounds have no reasons. They just follow the scent and tear the fox to pieces when they catch it.” He offered the chocolates again. “The early Nazis used to wash these down with pink champagne. There’s something about that in one of your grandfather’s books—Lori playing Scarlatti on the piano while Heydrich gorges himself. Do you play the piano?”
“A little.”
“It runs in the family. Your grandmother was a very good musician. So was your mother, of course, but they played in entirely different styles. The best amateur player I ever heard was Wolkowicz, but don’t take that as an invitation to bring him up again.”
“You mean ever again?”
“Not today anyway. We’ve gotten off the track.”
8
THE 0. G. BEGAN TO TALK ABOUT BERLIN AGAIN AND THE HABITUAL cheerful note, almost a chuckle, that was his conversational trademark came back into his voice. He had not wanted to answer Zarah’s questions about Wolkowicz, but now that he was controlling the subject of the conversation again he was his old cordial, avuncular self.
“The great thing about Hubbard and Lori Christopher, the thing that made them so enviable,” he said, “was that they had got themselves right outside of the cage of the conventions. In the 1920s most poople were still prisoners of nineteenth-century codes of behavior. But he had escaped from New England and all it stood for in his mind, she had escaped from Prussia and all it symbolized for her, and they made their own world in which they could do and be anything they liked. It was an island they lived on, really, with a population of two—later on three, counting Paul, then four when Meryem arrived.”
“I thought they had lots of friends,” Zarah said. “The novels certainly make it seem that way.”
“They did, and they chose them for themselves. No one was as happy as they were, of course; their friends were really just a bunch of shipwrecked sailors who washed ashore at their dinner table. They fed them and were kind to them and clapped when they did the hornpipe. But at the end of the evening they put them all on a raft and shoved them off.”
“You make them sound very cold-hearted and selfish.”
“No, no; you mustn’t get that idea. They weren’t either of those things, not at all. Of course, people in love are selfish about each other, and Lori and Hubbard were no exception, but they were very good to their friends. Good gravy! They were willing to die for them, as they proved more than once.”
“It’s true, then, that they smuggled people out of Germany under the nose of the Gestapo?”
“Perfectly true. A dozen or more. And every one of them, with one exception, was a Jew. This was treason; it was worse than treason, worse than any crime in the Nazi law book; they were poisoning the well of their own tribe, because Lori and Hubbard were Aryans if anyone ever was. If they’d been caught not one person in Germany would have stood up for them. And darn few anywhere else. The fact is, most people in the western world thought that Hitler was onto a good idea where the Jews were concerned. Anti-Semitism was part of the air we breathed in those days; if you don’t think so, read the novels others were writing. Hemingway, Fitzgerald and just about all the rest of them except your grandfather, who was never as famous as they were—funny coincidence—thought it was the most natural thing in the world to write the most disgusting tripe about the Jews … Sorry, I got carried away.”
“You’re not an anti-Semite?”
“No, thank you very much, I’m not. Far from it. But I darn well might have been if it hadn’t been for your grandparents. Hubbard and Lori were the ones who made me see the light. Their house was the center of my universe in Berlin, and it was full of these amazing friends of theirs—brilliant people, good people, people who were capable of changing the world for the better with their work, and most of them were headed for the gas chamber and the ovens. Of course no one knew that at the time, with the single exception of Meryem. She saw it in her visions all the time.”
“She told you that?”
“Hubbard did. It worried him because Lori believed it, dreamed about it, talked about it; he couldn’t get her off the subject; he wanted to take her and Paul to America, get right away from the whole situation, but Lori wouldn’t go. She was obsessed by it in the end, this vision of Hell on earth with Germans, Germans, people like herself, stoking the fires that Meryem kept seeing in the cards. You have to remember that your grandmother was a purebred Prussian who had been raised to believe that her menfolks were the most honorable creatures in the world; and of course, in their thick-headed medieval way, they were.”
“Then how were they capable of doing what they did?”
“You haven’t been paying attention to what I’ve been telling you. Any Christian nation was capable of slaughtering the Jews; believe me, there would have been no shortage of volunteers to run the death camps in Russia or France or England or even in the good old U. S. A. The truest sentence Hubbard ever wrote was the one that reads, ‘Two thousand years of Christian teaching produced the SS.’ It just happened to be the Germans who did the deed; it could have been anybody. Nobody wants to hear that, but you can take it from me it’s true. That’s why the whole world hates the Germans so—they see their own secrets writ large in them. If the Nazis had won the war, as they darn near did, there wouldn’t be a Jew left on earth, and sweet young women like yourself would be teaching little children what a wonderful thing the Holocaust was.”
While the o. G. spoke Zarah watched him intently. It was a strange experience. The passions of the time and people he was describing did not register on his pallid face or in his genderless old contralto voice; he was as genial as ever in tone and expression. In describing these events seen with his own eyes, he might as well have been talking about historical incidents that occurred in the time of the Hittites, in a place that could not now be located with certainty upon a map. He seemed to sense her puzzlement, and paused for a moment to gaze at her with eyebrows lifted.
“Does all this disturb you?” he asked.
“No,” Zarah said. “I’m just wondering how much of it my father knew and understood while it was happening.”
“Oh, I think Paul understood what was happening, all right, at least the main points; he was a very clever boy. Very. But there were a lot of things he didn’t necessarily know, and maybe still doesn’t know, even after all these years.”
“What things?”
“The things that made Hubbard stop writing his books.”
“Is it something to do with the Experiment?”
The o. G. gave her a look of surprise. “That’s right. But how did you know that?”
“I told you, I’ve read all Hubbard’s books. There never was another one after The Rose and the Lotus. Did you know about the Experiment while it was going on?”
“No. Nobody did except the three of them. That’s why there was so much gossip; naturally the Charlottenburg crowd suspected hanky-panky.”
“But they were wrong?”
“Completely. A more virtuous couple never existed. Meryem, too; in spite of that wild air she had about her, the tattoo tears and all that, she was a very orthodox girl. I think the Experiment began as mockery, as a political joke, and then just got out of hand. Goodness knows there was a lot to mock in Berlin those days. The Nazis were the least of it—at first, anyhow. There was a famous story about the Christophers in Berlin. It was a moral hellhole in those days, musical beds, no such things as honor or fidelity, no idea that the Piper must be paid—something like America today. The Christophers took no part in all that. Hubbard was a Puritan Yankee at heart besides being in love with Lori, and Lori was a virtuous wife who thought her husband was a genius.”
