The Second Sight, page 6
“I know you can hear me, Paul,” she said, shouting.
The Frenchwomen on the bench shrank away from Cathy, staring.
She said, still shouting, “I swear that you’ll never know that your children exist. They’ll never know who their father is. From this moment you don’t exist—not for me, not for your children. I’m going where you’ll never find us.”
In the distance, unhearing, Christopher kissed Molly.
2
LLA KAHINA SAT ON THE LEATHER LIBRARY SOFA, A GLASS OF MINT on the table beside her, a book in her hands. While listening to Cathy talk, she marked her place with a finger. The title of her book, written in what seemed to be, but could not be, the Hebrew alphabet, was printed on the back cover. Cathy did not know why she registered these details, except that she had been seeing and smelling everything with heightened intensity ever since witnessing Christopher’s encounter with Molly.
“Do you mean what you say when you talk about my going home with you?” she asked.
“Of course I do,” Lla Kahina replied.
“I don’t mean for a visit. I mean to stay.”
“The answer is the same.”
“You’d better know why I’m asking,” Cathy said. “I want to hide Paul’s children from him, and to hide him from them. I don’t want them to know who he is or him to know who they are. Ever.”
Still wearing her cape, she paced back and forth across the carpet as she spoke. She had run home from the Luxembourg Garden through the balmy springlike air, and her face glistened with sweat. Her dampened hair stood up in peaks all over her head. She said, “Is it really as wild and lost where you come from as you say it is?”
“Yes, and as beautiful.”
“Don’t tell me any more than that. I don’t want to know where I’m going, or where I am when I get there.”
The next morning Cathy showed Lla Kahina a list of names, the people who knew about her pregnancy—the maid, the doctor, her banker, Otto and Maria Rothchild.
“The first three are easy,” Cathy said. “But Otto and Maria are another matter.”
“Paul will never see Otto again,” Lla Kahina said.
Cathy gave her a sharp look. “What about Maria?”
“She has no power over a person like Paul.”
A long silence ensued. For the twins’ sake, Cathy ate the last of her breakfast—the milk for their bones, the eggs for their brains, the bread for their muscles. Finally she said, “I hope you’re right about that.”
She rang for the maid. The woman entered the breakfast room, holding her hands limply before her as though she had been forced against her will to touch something disgusting. She disliked working for a pregnant American woman who seemed to have no husband and no friends except a tattooed native who wore tassels on the hems of her garments.
“Blanche, I have something to tell you,” Cathy said. “You can collect your things and go. I won’t need you anymore.” “But why, madame?”
“I’ve decided to go back to America to have my child.” “On one day’s notice?”
“That is my affair.” Cathy was rude because she wanted the woman to remember what she had said about returning to America. “You will have six months’ wages, one for every month you have been with us, and one as a bonus.”
“Normally, madame—”
“I know what’s normal in France.”
Cathy took the money, in American dollars, out of her purse. She had miscalculated the exchange rate, as usual, and the amount she handed over was much more than six months’ wages in francs. Blanche accepted the strange, drab, unFrench bills that had so much more value than was just and proper.
“You’re very kind, madame,” she said. “May I also have a reference? All this is so brusque that otherwise people may wonder.”
Cathy handed her a letter, written in French on one side of the page and English on the other, saying that Blanche had shown herself to be an economical shopper and a good cook who had given satisfaction despite the hardship of working for foreigners.
Blanche left the soiled breakfast dishes on the table and departed without saying goodbye.
Outside the apartment, Cathy hailed a taxi, the first she had taken for months, and went to the American Hospital. She told the nurse that she had decided to have her babies in America.
“At this late date?” the nurse said. “Why?”
“They’re Americans. They should be born in America. That way there’ll never be any question about their citizenship.”
“But the airlines won’t let you fly after the seventh month,” the nurse said. “You should talk to doctor before you do this. Really.”
Cathy smiled a rich girl’s smile: “I won’t tell TWA if you won’t. Just give me the records.”
The nurse made her sign a form, and then handed over a manila envelope.
At D.&D. Laux & Co., she withdrew the entire balance of her account. The total, accumulated over the nearly two years when Christopher had paid most of her expenses, was more than fifty thousand dollars. Cathy asked for it in hundred-dollar bills.
“No traveler’s checks, madam?”
“No, just money.”
The man in the bank seemed quite young, no more than a year or two older than Cathy. He spoke excellent English with a childlike American accent, as if forming words he had recently heard for the first time.
“Did you happen to go to college in California?” Cathy asked. He was pleased by the question, the first personal one she had asked him in the three or four years she had been coming to him.
“Stanford. Where did you go?”
Cathy gave him the same smile she had given the nurse. “What an American question. Bryn Mawr, but I barely managed to graduate. I’ll bet you got all A’s.”
“Sometimes a B, or even a C. There were many distractions at Stanford.”
“That’s why we go to college back home, for the distractions.” Cathy leaned forward slightly. “Look, I’m going home to have my baby, and then we’re going to travel, maybe for a long time. I’ll cable or write when I want you to send me money.”
“The deposits arrive from New York, normally, on the twentieth of each month.”
Cathy’s trust fund, set up by her maternal grandparents because, as they explained in their wills, Cathy’s father was in the horse business and therefore liable to go broke at any moment, paid her between two and three thousand dollars a month, depending on how her stocks were doing. D.&D. Laux & Co. managed the trust and paid the taxes.
“There’s one more favor,” Cathy said to the banker. “I’d like to be able to send you letters for my parents. Can I just address them to you, and you can throw away the outer envelope and just give them the plain envelope inside?”
“With pleasure.”
“Don’t forget to throw away the postmarks. I don’t want them coming to visit me for a while.”
“You can be quite sure of my complete discretion.”
Cathy picked up her money, five stacks of bills still in their paper bands marked with the name of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, and put them into her purse.
After leaving the bank she walked into the first travel agency she saw and bought two one-way airplane tickets to North Africa on the next day’s flight. She paid cash.
That afternoon, as usual, Cathy ate the twins’ tea and took her nap for them, but instead of going for her walk, she wrote a letter to her mother and father.
I haven’t told you because I didn’t know how to tell you, but Paul and I have separated. This happened late last summer, and it’s all for the best. We just weren’t meant for each other, although I had a very hard time believing that and Paul was too kind—or too something—to mention it, but he didn’t argue when I finally figured it out for myself.
I’ve been staying here with a friend (a nice woman I met after the break-up, no one you know). My friend is kind of like a psychologist, and she’s been a real help to me. I understand now what happened between Paul and me, and why it happened, and I accept it and am all right emotionally. Honest.
But I feel the need to be by myself, maybe for a long time, so I’ve decided to travel for a while. And—this will be hard for you—I don’t want anyone, not even you two, to know where I am. Please try to understand that this is absolutely necessary for me. I took all my money out of the bank, bought a ticket, and I leave tomorrow. I have no itinerary, no plan, no return date. I just want to go, and be alone, and think.
I don’t know when I’ll come back. I have enough money and enough sense to be all right wherever I am, so try not to worry. There’s no getting back to the person I was before, but that may not be a bad thing, either. I’ll write to you every month, or as often as I can, through the bank. Don’t worry f I miss a month. I don’t suppose you can trust the post office in some of the places I’ll be.
Don’t blame Paul for all this. That would be wrong and unjust. Just, please, don’t try to see him. It’s over and I want it to be over. He has somebody else now (this happened after we parted, so there’s no need for Daddy to shoot him), and I hope that he’ll be happy.
I love you both very, very much, and I hope that you can forgive me for not telling you all this before now. I just couldn’t.
Cathy sealed the envelope and addressed it, then put it inside another envelope, and addressed that to the man at the bank. She knew, as surely as if Lla Kahina had seen it in the cards, that she would never see her parents, or anyone else she had known, ever again. Her old life was over. “Goodbye,” she said aloud, shedding not one single tear, any more than she had done when she and Christopher parted.
3
CATHY LEFT PARIS, AS SHE HAD LEFT ROME, IN THE CLOTHES SHE wore, with only her large purse stuffed with money for luggage. After a long flight they approached the Idaren Draren at sunset—snowy peaks and rust-colored crags silhouetted against a cloudless lavender sky. Just as Lla Kahina had predicted, the view was familiar, and Cathy felt a pang on seeing it through the scratched window of the airplane, as if she had been happy in this place a long time ago.
The heat on the ground was intense. After passing through customs they took a taxi from the airport and drove through a city toward the mountains. Looking out the open window of the weaving car, Cathy had a blurry impression of narrow streets filled with children riding donkeys at the trot, men driving wagons pulled by emaciated horses, and veiled women carrying jugs and bundles balanced on their heads. The stink of many kinds of animal droppings came inside along with lungfuls of parched air stirred up by the passage of the car.
The taxi climbed into the foothills, leaving the paved road behind at the edge of town and following a bumpy dirt track for several miles until it, too, ended. The car stopped and they got out. Lla Kahina paid the driver, who unloaded their luggage, then turned his rattling Simca around and drove off without so much as a goodbye.
“The others are waiting for us a little higher up,” Lla Kahina said, pointing in the direction of the mountains.
She set off along a steep path that ran beside a roaring brook. As they walked she pointed out the trees and wild flowers, naming them in Berber; Cathy nodded, not even knowing the names of American flora in English. As Lla Kahina had said so often, the landscape was the color of henna. Soil, rocks, the whole scene was composed of shades of red except for the trees, and even they looked red when viewed from a distance because they were coated with red dust. A deserted village, made of powdery henna bricks, was cemented somehow to the side of a dizzying cliff against a backdrop of rocky crags; its houses put out no smoke, nothing moved, she could see no path leading up from the valley.
“Who lives there?”
“Ghosts.”
Cathy was short of breath, and stopped beside the path. She was surprised at how much strength the twins took out of her. This hadn’t happened on her walks in the city.
“It’s the altitude,” Lla Kahina said. “Breathe deeply, go slowly. It’s not far.”
Soon they arrived at their destination. Around a turn in the trail, six men waited for them by a waterfall in a meadow. A small herd of animals—half a dozen sheep, a couple of kids, many donkeys, a dozen fine-boned Barbary horses—grazed on the other side of the stream. The men were all young—muscular, obvious horsemen, with handsome, clank-shaven Semitic faces. They were dressed alike in white, with wide black sashes around their waists and large black turbans on their heads. All wore purple vests with many brass buttons and the inevitable purple tassels along the hem. They carried curved knives in ornate scabbards, and some had rifles slung over their backs.
Lla Kahina embraced them one by one, and then turned to Cathy. Each boy—now that she was closer, Cathy saw that most were barely out of their teens—shook hands with her, looking curiously into her face and talking loudly all the while in Berber, or what Cathy supposed was Berber. As a child, she had read, over and over again, a romantic book called The Magnificent Barb, about the fleet Moorish stallion that was bred to big-boned English mares to produce the Thoroughbred. This was like a scene from a book—bright rugs spread on the ground in front of low white tents turned pink by the dust, wisps of smoke rising from charcoal braziers.
“How long does it take to get where we’re going?” she asked. “Five days, usually,” Lla Kahina said. “We’ll start tomorrow morning.”
4
RIDING UPHILL TAXES THE MUSCLES, BUT CATHY WAS IN NO GREAT discomfort. The twins were not due for another couple of weeks. Her belly was compact, and her muscles held the babies firmly even when she rode. The mountain trails were dizzying, but the horses never moved faster than a walk. The Ja’wabi stopped often to drink tea or wait for something to happen—Cathy never knew what; they would stop, listen, exchange opinions, and then, when whatever they had been expecting came to pass, always out of sight and hearing, they would repack, remount, and move on.
After they climbed above the tree line, the Ja’wabi fed the horses four times a day. This seemed excessive to Cathy.
“You don’t want to ride a hungry horse along a trail with a thousand-foot drop at the edge of it,” Lla Kahina explained. “What if he sees something to eat, a bunch of leaves, and reaches for it?”
It was cold now, with gusts of wind that smelled clean and damp instead of dusty and scorched. The Ja’wabi got out sheepskin coats. Cathy put on her Loden cape. On the fourth morning, after camping on a barren slope in a wind that drove grit through the walls of the tents, they rode along a path beside a deep river gorge. The trails were even narrower than before. Large pebbles, covering the track like the polished rocks in a stream bed, rolled under the animals’ hooves. By noon they were only halfway across. They halted at a wider place, about the size of a large closet, that had been gouged out of the side of the cliff by the river millions of years before.
The boys lighted a fire to brew tea, then fed the donkeys and goats and left them standing on the trail, but tied the horses and sheep, which were too stupid to be trusted not to plunge over the edge, to outcroppings of rock.
Cathy drank her tea. It was highly sweetened; she had avoided sugar all her life and she did not really like it. But she knew she needed something to keep her going. She had eaten very little on the journey, only some bread and stewed vegetables. Despite her hunger, despite the wind, Cathy felt an overwhelming sense of well-being. She was warm, safe, and in the midst of a wildly beautiful and mysterious world. All morning, as they passed along the precipice, she had been talking to the twins in her thoughts, telling them that she would bring them back to this miraculous place as soon as they were old enough to ride, so that they could see it for themselves.
Suddenly she felt something warm, warmer than her skin, on the inside of her thigh. She handed Lla Kahina her half-empty glass of tea, turned her back to the boys, and touched her body. The legs of her woolen trousers were soaked with a sticky fluid.
“I think my water has broken,” she said.
Lla Kahina reached inside Cathy’s cape and felt with her own hand.
“The child is coming,” she said.
“Children,” Cathy said automatically. “There are two. Why do you always say ‘child’?”
Just then Cathy felt the first contraction. It wasn’t specially strong. The boys were putting up a tent. They worked in silence, holding on to the flapping canvas with difficulty. Sitting on a rock, she felt a second contraction, vague like the first, but more noticeable now that she was sure what it was. The boys finished what they were doing and left, driving the sheep and goats before them, leaving Cathy and Lla Kahina alone.
“God, what a wind,” Cathy said. Her hood was down and she could hear it plainly, moaning through the rocks.
Lla Kahina led her inside the tent. Cathy followed obediently. The ground was covered with a rug, and in the middle of the rug, two large stones of equal size had been arranged side by side. Lla Kahina covered them with smaller rugs. A rope dangled from the ceiling. Cathy started to lie down on the floor.
“No. Sit on the stones,” Lla Kahina said.
“The stones? What for?”
“It’s better than lying down. Let me help you.”
Passively, Cathy let Lla Kahina remove her dress. Her skin was dripping with sweat.
“It’s all right,” Lla Kahina said. “Sit down. That’s it. Put one leg on one stone and the other on the other stone.”
The position was uncomfortable. “I don’t want to be like this,” Cathy said. “I want to lie down.”
“This is the best way,” Lla Kahina said. “I know it seems strange to you, but believe me, it’s better. Pull on the rope when you feel the pains.”
Lit rosily from without by sunshine, the tent filled up with wind, collapsed, and then respired again, like a lung. After a while Lla Kahina put a baby into Cathy’s arms and showed her how to feed it.
