Of course it was her. Of course she had been there all the time. And of course the answer had been staring me in the face all these months, to use her past voice to cure that amnesia, and only the relief flooding me drowned out the reproach that it could have been sooner, the day she had been brought back on a stretcher from Berlin, if only I had not been so consumed by hatred.
She saw in my face what I was thinking and shook her head.
“No,” she said. “You don’t understand. It was never about me. It was a test for you.”
What did she mean? What test? And why tell me I didn’t understand, instead of celebrating, whooping in wonderful 1992, rushing to my dad’s room, rousing Vic and Hugh so we could break open a bottle of champagne? She was back and that was enough, that—
Cam carefully set aside the blue folder and the manuscript and took my hand in hers. “There’s something you need to know.” And then started patiently, in excruciating and twisted detail, to tell me about the accident and what had followed.
Nothing new, at first, in her tale. She had indeed suffered from the diagnosed retrograde amnesia due to that chunk dislodged from the Wall, awakening in the Charité Hospital thinking she was fourteen years old. And when my father had walked in, she took his excuses at face value, certain her own dad awaited her at home. Dazed and confused, she had welcomed, she said, some drugs that put her to sleep.
Upon opening her eyes a few hours later—and here Cam paused for the longest while before plunging on—when she awoke, well, she had remembered everything, her whole life, including those last hours in the hospital.
She had healed herself.
I interrupted her, startled, a dreadful bird gnawing at my stomach, bleeding me with questions.
“But—but—why didn’t you—if you—if you—these two years, we’ve—you lost your memory again, right, right away, right? When you came back here you—I mean, you didn’t recollect a thing, you still—I mean—”
“No, Fitzroy. I had total recall, even that I’d been afflicted momentarily with amnesia. A bit of a headache, my neck hurt like hell, woozy and disoriented, but entirely myself, twenty-two years old, married to the wonderful Mr. Foster junior, the bride who had just concluded the mission we had planned, all the pieces of the puzzle in place—or almost all of them, I had yet to pass through Zurich—the same person I am now, my identity, memories, love intact.”
I stared at her in disbelief. Disbelief was better than anger, than the humiliation starting to poison me in its toxic glow—impossible that she had been fooling me, us, the doctors. Even to contemplate that she could have perpetrated such a cruel hoax caused me a distress and grief that bordered on insanity. To deliberately allow me to believe she was ill, knowing how my mother’s death had disarmed me, no, it couldn’t be.
I stood up from the bed. Violently wrenched my hand from her hand. I stood up because I felt like slapping her. Oh God. I had just recovered my wife from near death and I felt like slapping her.
“Sit down, Fitzroy Foster,” she said calmly. “I deserve to be heard.”
“Deserve? Deserve? You don’t—you don’t—”
“You think it was easy? You think I did it to hurt you?”
“How the fuck do I know why you did it?”
“Maybe you’d like to hear why. Sit down.”
I obeyed her. Damn it. To be so in love with her that I sat down and gave her a chance to explain what admitted no explanation, could never be justified.
If Cam had taken my hand again, I would have rejected her, perhaps even have dashed out of the room. Forever. But she made no such attempt.
Her voice simmered with tranquility, as if she were telling me the result of an experiment in her lab.
When Cam had awoken in that Berlin hospital bed and realized that she was cured, her first instinct was to press the buzzer for the nurse to summon Jerry so he could relate the good news to her husband, who must be out of his mind with worry.
“Yes. I was, of course, I was, I was going crazy—for you to be sick like that and me not able to travel, comfort you. Oh God, why, why, why keep up this sham for so long. How could you?”
“You had already been through the worst, the shock of the accident, the fear I might die—but that was over, I was coming home, one day more or less wouldn’t matter. You know how I love surprises. I wanted to see your face when I told you I was well, enchanted that you’d think it was the sight of you that had cured me. The more the idea buzzed around in my head in that quiet hospital ward, the more I savored the strategy. Give you all the delight in saving me. That you should do for me, bring me back to life, what I had done for you. As if we were swimming together again, not in a pool, but in existence itself.”
“What? What are you talking about? Swimming apart from each other, that’s what—”
She smiled at me with a tenderness that would have mellowed the heart of—of—I searched for someone cold and conniving and genocidal—of Julius Popper. How dared she smile at me like that?
“Listen, Fitz, please listen. If you thought you’d woken me up from my amnesia, it would be great for you, that’s how I saw it, a way of activating you, putting you in charge after so many years of being passive. Preparing you for the next stage, now that our research phase was over. Like in science, darling. First comes the discovery, say, of a gene that causes cancer, then comes the more arduous adventure of getting it out of the laboratory and finding ways to apply that breakthrough to something real, make it into a medicine, so it can liberate us from our past.”
She was talking as if I were some sort of chimp in one of her experiments—and I told her so in an icy voice.
“That’s unfair, Fitzroy Foster. Though I’ll admit I was curious, you know, to see how you’d repair me, what parts of my life and yours you’d reveal in order to help me remember. I only intended this to be for a short while, a few hours, maybe not even a few minutes. It was meant to empower you, darling.”
“Well, it didn’t, your stupid experiment. And my dad and brothers and—you must have realized pretty soon that I had no idea how to heal you, that I was lost without you, your guidance, your—oh what’s the use? If you didn’t call your little game off once it was clear that I—if you didn’t understand then—”
“Because I was baffled, that’s why. I never anticipated that you would react by lying to me, treating me as if I couldn’t deal with your past or my past, as if I were—as if I were a child or a savage or—”
“That’s not true. I was just trying to protect you, from pain, from nightmares, from—”
“From him, Fitz. You wanted to protect me from him. Saw a chance to get rid of Henri, lock him out of our existence, start from zero, don’t deny it—as if everything that had happened to him, everything we learned since he made his appearance, didn’t matter. You decided to erase him!”
“Damn right! Mom felt sorry for him and he got her killed. You felt even more pity than she did and what did he do? Almost dispatched you! Why not use your accident for something good? Wasn’t that our agreement, that we were doing all this to get him to leave us alone?”
“I don’t think that’s what he wants, Fitz.”
“What he wants, what he wants! Again, like the first day I showed him to—who is he? Who is he? Your question. Well, you found out and what did it get us, huh?”
“I wasn’t wrong to be inclusive, draw closer to him. And I kept on waiting, since the day your dad flew me back from Berlin, for you to also realize it. Waiting for you to take out the photos, show them to me, open the drawer where you hid all my material and the folder and read my own words back to me, at least respect my work that much. Waiting, waiting for you to bring me into your life, the life we made together. But you were scared.”
“And that’s when you should have cut this madness short, stopped playing with me.”
“No. You had to get there on your own.”
Again, I felt the impulse to hurt her, shake her till she fully recognized how harsh she’d been, wake her up—wake her up?!!—to what she’d done.
“So now he’s—all this, even this latest bit of insanity—it’s all been for my benefit. Is that what you’re saying, that it was all for my benefit? You know what’s really indefensible? He’s turned you against me. You grew too close to him. So close there was no room for me. I should never have let that happen.”
“There you go again. As if you can control him, what he means, any more than you can control the image of his that keeps cropping up. He’s not going away, Fitz.”
“And when were you going to tell me all this? How long did you intend to wait?”
“First, my dear, stop—just stop pretending that this depended exclusively on what I did or didn’t do, as if you were innocent of prolonging this misunderstanding. I gave you every chance to come clean. What was one of the immediate things I asked to see? Your family album. And you started with your claptrap and evasions, then proceeded to feed me nonsense not fit for an imbecile. About not liking to go out, not having any of the friends we had shared in 1981, oh, do I have to repeat all those fabrications? You were so glad I was behaving like a good little girl that you never even wondered why I was so gullible?”
“Well, yes, I did wonder, I thought it was, well, endearing, sort of—I loved that you trusted me and, hey, I knew you’d get over it soon, I thought, I prayed it was temporary.”
“And I thought, I prayed your reaction was also temporary. He can’t keep this up for more than a week. But you did. And I just followed your lead. Remember who was in the driver’s seat, Fitz. Up to you how long the journey lasted.”
“I trusted you!”
“And I trusted you! Trusted you to reach the right decision, never imagining it would take over two years. But once I’d dug this hole for myself, I was determined to persevere. And you know what? It ended up being all for the better, that’s what I began to realize.”
“Oh no, now you’re going to say it was good for us, for me? All this shit we’ve been through?”
“Think of this, Fitzroy Foster. Think of what would have happened if I’d come home from Berlin, told you I was all right, and the next night or that very night we’d have—I’d have read my report to you. It would take a few hours—how long did it take you to—?”
“Three hours.”
“There you go. Three hours. You’d have listened, we’d have hugged each other as if all our problems were solved, my research all neatly packaged, everything tied with perfect ribbons, but you’d be no closer to him than before, you wouldn’t have suffered to get there, paid your dues.”
“You said we had paid our dues.”
“I was wrong.”
“The hell I’ve been through, losing my—losing you, seven years of desolation, that wasn’t enough, you had to add an extra two years?”
“What was worse, Fitz? Having to live with that image imposed on you forever, or having to live without me? What was worse?”
“Losing you,” I said. Reluctantly, because I didn’t want to agree with anything she declared, anything she was arguing. But it was true. There had been nothing worse.
“Losing me,” she said, flatly, without crowing over her victory. “So you hadn’t really been through hell. You hadn’t touched the depths of Henri’s experience. I don’t think you have yet, maybe you never will, I certainly will never even approach true knowledge. But at least now you are closer.”
She was insane. And completely unrecognizable. He had put her up to this. Something far more perverse than what I had originally thought. If he had simply stolen her from me with a piece of crashing stone, then at least she would have remained intact, pure, innocent. But to then resurrect and persuade her not to tell me, keep me in the dark, that was truly evil, to devise ever more dire punishments for someone he’d never met. Would he never be satisfied?
She looked at me, saw through me as if I were water. Oh, how I had missed that look, what she had concealed during these months of agony, clouding her vision of any trace of the deep wisdom with which she steered through reality. “You’re blaming him again, Fitz.”
“Oh, he’s not to blame now? Now he’s a saint? Like you?”
“A saint would never have done such a terrible thing to you, my love, so no, I’m not, far from it.”
“But you think he’s a saint?”
“I really don’t know anything about him. Maybe he did put the thought in my head. Maybe he does want to screw you over. Or that was his initial plan: seek revenge inside the body that brings together the two rivers that defined his life, the Petit stream and the Hagenbeck stream. But here’s what I’ve been thinking, and boy have you given me time to meditate—maybe he evolved once he got to know you, realized you might be a portal, believes that, given the right environment, you will understand his message. Maybe he’s testing you, your capacity for forgiveness.”
I latched onto that last word like a drowning man.
Forgiveness? Forgiveness?
Unforgivable. What she had done to me, to herself, the years of happiness she had filched. Unforgivable. The word I threw at her like a stone, like a wall, like a bulldozer.
As usual, she had an answer.
“Like what they did to Henri? Because if that’s truly unforgivable, then he’ll never let you go. Why should he forgive what your ancestors did to him, out of greed, pride, ambition, curiosity, indifference? What right do you have to demand it? Are you better than them?”
And so it went for a good while as the first day of the new year stretched past dawn. Everything I sent her way was like a boomerang. She had acted selfishly? So had I. She had excluded me from her life? I had excluded her from mine. So it went, so it went, until I had spent myself, could feel the quagmire of my resentment being drained drop by drop, bog by bog, discovered that the only thing I wanted was to take her in my arms and make love to her and fall asleep when she fell asleep and no more nights as the guardian of her dreams, I had prayed for her return and she had come back, wasn’t that enough?
No. I had one more question and I did not want to ask it and I did, I had to. More of an accusation than a question, because I knew the answer, I feared I knew the answer, I feared the answer.
“You enjoyed yourself, Camilla Wood? Watching me sink into misery, desperate for your advice, shut off from the source of all comfort, you enjoyed that?”
She took her time responding, as if she had been waiting for many months for someone to ask this, brooding about it in the loneliness of her own hours.
Then: “Yes.”
Just that word. And then: “I enjoyed it. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hate myself for turning into this spectator of your anguish. I discovered that inside me there was this dark, demonic self. It was a relief, not being as perfect and flawless as you made me out to be. Being more like them.”
“Them?”
“Petit and Hagenbeck and Virchow and Jacobsen and Saint-Hilaire and even like Julius Popper. Maybe I wanted to cast off my feeling of smug superiority—oh me, I would never do something like they did, I hope at least I wouldn’t. I told myself that I persisted in this experiment out of love for you, but the truth—I think something in me relished wielding all that power, unburdening myself of that image you have of me, that I’m oh so impeccable.”
I was shaken to the core and yet, and yet, had I really expected that our relationship would always be like that morning when we had coordinated our swimming, together, together, before even one word had been exchanged? She had always been too good to be true. To accept that there might be, that there was, a twist in the fabric of her personality might be an obligatory, unavoidable step in the difficult process of becoming an adult.
Or was I simply rationalizing, suppressing my rage because I couldn’t stop loving her, because I had been itching to shout hallelujah since I’d awoken to find her by my side just as I had seen her when she had left for Europe two and a half years ago, because the other alternative was to live forever in shadows, to lose any future, all hope.
I was at a crossroads. For the first time in my life.
Up till then, everything had just happened to me, as if I were a mere receptacle. Even before Henri. Coasting along since my first breath, drifting from one birthday to the next, what the family album exposed, from event to event as if every problem could be resolved like an algebraic formula, cruising into adolescence with the confidence that someday I’d understand what life was all about, rebelling just enough against my parents to give myself the illusion that I was determining my fate, whereas I was really just fulfilling whatever plans they had laid out for me, kindergarten—oh what a cute little monkey—elementary school—our monkey is growing up!—middle school—I guess we can’t call you a monkey anymore, Roy—and high school. And me next to the Arc de Triomphe and in the Jardin d’Acclimatation, not knowing what I was seeing, what had darkened any of the places I passed through, museum visits and swim teams and baseball games and parties, even Cam—even her, like everything else, an accident that befell me, nothing actually of my own doing, bothered slightly by that excessive normality—but not bothered sufficiently to break out and do something original, become someone else and other and unrecognizable, surprise myself. Perhaps that act of solitary sex, my first real choice, something I could take full responsibility for.
And then, almost immediately, Henri.
He’d come visiting and never left, and my life became even more acquiescent. Aware, oh so aware, that I was chained to circumstances I had not selected—but now not even harboring the misapprehension that I could change course, now married to my sickness, now submissive to a fault, caught, like Henri himself, in a world not of my making, made into a stranger, a pariah, a victim.
Cam had not transformed that fundamental dynamic, that I had always complied with what fate had dished out to me. She had been the active partner: her phone call years ago and her carte postale the next day, and then directing the quest and the research and even the date of our marriage. And when she had suffered her accident and I was handed the chance to be in command, show initiative and help her heal, I had simply retreated, let things take their course, a spectator of my own pain as if there was nothing I could do to alleviate it.
Well, now I was confronting a real choice.
I could dwell and sulk in this outrage done to me or I could climb out of that anger and chart a new map for my life. I could take control of the only thing that truly belonged to me—not Cam, nobody owns anybody else, I had just been taught that ruthless, necessary lesson—the one thing for which we should be judged: how to react when you have been damaged, when you feel betrayed by the one person who was the foundation and scaffolding and architecture of your very being, how to live with that and not succumb to despair and mistrust.
Did this mean that I’d forget that my Cam had let me twist and turn and had even, by her own reluctant admission, somehow enjoyed my plight? No, that festered inside me and would perhaps never be entirely assuaged. But that was what growing up meant. That we are imperfect beings, that we do stupid, incomprehensible things to one another, that we justify doing such things because we are too afraid to see our true image in the mirror. The contradictory truth I had to face: that we cannot live trusting anyone and that we also cannot live unless we renew that trust every day, because life without love is not worth living.
Cam was right. It was up to me.
She must have seen something shifting inside me, the seed, the hint, the dimmest lightning of an idea. If I could forgive her, might Henri not forgive me?
Now she took my hand and was not mistaken, because I accepted the temple of her offering, the refuge of her lips that followed and everything else, everything else that I had dreamt of for seven lean years and then for the months of her absence in Europe and finally during these last two years of loss and distance, how I had always wanted to greet the dawn that was renewing itself as we were, as we were.
And the first thing she asked in the morning, before we went down for breakfast—we had agreed not to let my dad or my brothers know that she had been playing a game all this time, preferred to greet them with the news that the miracle we had been awaiting had finally blessed us—her first question under that cold snowy January sky was:
“What year is this, Fitz?”
“Nineteen ninety-two,” I said, fighting the concern that perhaps she had elapsed back—this time for real—into amnesia land.
“Nineteen ninety-two,” she repeated the number with delight, rolled it on her tongue as if it were my mouth in her mouth. “You don’t think it’s significant that we’re ready to restart our adventure precisely five hundred years since Columbus set sail for the world which Henri’s ancestors had walked and inhabited and also sailed in canoes for thousands of years? Can there be a better date to figure out—together, Fitzroy Foster—what your voyager expects from us?”
I pondered this question as we descended the stairs hand in hand and as Cam received my dad’s jubilation and the rapture of my brothers, and continued to ponder it through a sumptuous brunch as my wife filled the rest of the family in regarding the Hagenbeck ancestry, congratulating Dad for his lineage no longer being solely responsible for the haunting. And Dad had answered by proposing a photo session, the first in over two years, perhaps this cannibal would leave us alone now that the family had acknowledged our ancestral participation in his fate, perhaps he was feeling benevolent, it was the New Year, after all, 1992.
So there it was, again, that date, and its possible relevance looming large when I sat down for my portrait, as if I were Victor Hugo in person and Dad were his distant forefather Pierre Petit. I did not protest this futile exercise or bother to tell him that I knew what was going to happen. No consternation when those features of Henri emerged, crowning my body with his unforgettable eyes, confirming that our knowledge of his exact itinerary, mistreatment, and death did not mean that the journey was over for us. Or for him. You know that, Fitz, his face seemed to be whispering, don’t tell me you really believed it would be that easy. I’ve missed you the last two years, man. Isn’t it great to be together again?
I smiled at his cascade of words inside me, insanely winked at my visitor in complicity.
My father caught me in the act—as he had so often when I was a child, and just like back then, now he was not pleased either.
“What? Getting chummy with the ghost? Recovering your wife hasn’t made you all sentimental and gooey and forgiving, has it? All of a sudden this demon’s benign?”
The rancor in Dad’s voice, contrasting with the serene, impassioned conversation I had held with my darling that dawn, bared something he had not wished to express when Cam had materialized in all her glory: I had my wife back and he had lost his, the monster had spared one and taken the other. But more crucially: we could not count on my father to second us in any effort at reconciliation with the savage who had ruined our family and left him bereft.
I could see Cam on the verge of trying to reason with him. She didn’t realize the endless abyss of his hatred, something dark and dank flaring in his breath, the overflowing rage of his fingers as he ripped the Polaroid print into pieces and cast them onto the burning logs of the fireplace. Even when he laughed—it was more of a cackle than a laugh, more of a sob than a cackle—Cam seemed oblivious, intent on saying something, wanting to include him in the next stage of our search. He had lost so much, he didn’t deserve to be left behind.
And yet, Cam finally said nothing. Just looked at me.
She needed me to enter the fray, respond to my own doubts by responding to my father’s. She needed me to publicly commit to the path we were about to go down.
“You could be right, Dad,” I said. “It’s certainly a possibility that he’s a demon. But there are other ways, more benevolent ways, of looking at him.”
Dad was not in a mood to ask me what I meant.
“The bastard murdered your mother! He tried to kill your wife! And you’re on his side now? How can you—oh God, you, of all people—what do you need? For him to start exterminating the whole human race, everything we love?”
Since infancy, I had learned to recognize danger signals, when his anger was on the edge of turning to rage and from rage into fury. Mom had helped me to navigate the endless sea of his mood swings, recede before the wave exploded, make sure that he never got physical. Mom had been an expert at this, the only one in the family who knew how to defy Dad without trying his patience.
But Mom, of course, wasn’t here. The whole point of his outburst was that she could not help us anymore. All I could do was guess what she would have said, how she’d have calmed him. That he was a man who believed in science and that the law of statistics and probability indicated that two events—such as a boat capsizing in the Amazon and a piece of mortar falling from a wall in Berlin—were not necessarily part of the same pattern, even if both victims were related to the same human being, and had been on similar missions of discovery. That the interpretation of those events, the decision to interlock them, depended on the perspective and outlook from which we started out. If someone, like my father now or me as I had been for all these years, understood Henri to be out for revenge, then that is what we would predictably discern in whatever befell us, regardless of whether he even had the power to enact those assaults and misfortunes. If, on the other hand, we thought that his intervention in my life was not malignant—a stance that Cam had increasingly adopted, a position that I was on the brink of adhering to—then everything changed. Rather than Mom being killed by my visitor’s desire to liquidate the great-granddaughter of Carl Hagenbeck’s estranged granddaughter, Henri had been striving to protect her. And we could construe Berlin in the same way: it had been his intercession there that had averted a similar tragedy killing my wife. Or maybe all of us were mistaken and these accidents were no more than that, accidents—and Henri had nothing to do with either of them, and we were being distracted from what really mattered by presuming that a youngster who had been so helpless in life was a master of the universe in death.
That’s what I should have explained, composedly, to my father.
And yet, given that we could not agree on the fundamentals, was it not useless to enter into any substantive discussion, why even go through the motions of a deliberation, why not avoid altercations altogether? That is what Mom would have concluded, that is what she whispered in my ear. Don’t make matters worse. Keep the family together. Be as happy as you can because you never know when some tragedy will strike you, at a birthday breakfast or on the Amazon river or at a celebration in a city no longer divided by a wall. Indulge him, Roy. And find your own road to peace with the woman you love.
The consolation of hearing her voice inside me, my mother’s ability to persist somewhere, anywhere, could not prevail over the grief that it was not her mouth saying it, her lips blowing the words to me, one hand in mine and the other holding onto my father.
That’s when, in order not to start crying, not to open the new year, Mom’s favorite day of the year, with tears, that’s when I took a step forward and hugged my father. He tried to break loose but I wouldn’t let him, Cam joined our embrace and then my two brothers became entangled in that messy jumble of arms and torsos, all of us simply exulting in our communal breath, rejoicing in the possibility of loving each other enough to leave it at that and go our separate ways.
But which way was ours?
That was something that Cam and I now set out to discover.
Discovery was the key word, of course. Five hundred years since the discovery of America, though there were already many who were derisively calling it something else and declaring there was nothing to celebrate—especially the descendants of those who had existed for millennia on the continent incorporated into the Western world so abruptly, so violently, so unexpectedly on October 12, 1492.
Something had opened up in the history of humanity that day, when the world changed forever, when Henri’s fate in the South and our fate in the North had been determined. Columbus had started it all, returning with six Arawak Indians to be flaunted in the court and streets of Spain, he was the first to call them cannibals, the first to decide that their earth and trees did not belong to them, the first to describe with alien eyes what he saw.
If Cam hadn’t been hit by the debris from the Berlin Wall, if she hadn’t feigned the amnesia, if we hadn’t lost over two years, that date wouldn’t have entered into our discussion of what to do with the knowledge brought back from Europe, but as it was . . .
“It’s got to be a signal,” Cam said cheerfully—her optimism really was astonishing, how I had missed it, how I beseeched it to lift me up, now more than ever, now that the pangs of betrayal kept simmering somewhere in my soul. “Look at it this way: we’ve been given a chance. That whatever we have to do to atone will coincide with the commemoration, for good and for bad, of the half millennium since the first Indians met the first Europeans . . .”
Her words triggered in me an idea: What if we journeyed to Zurich and—
And I enjoyed her eyes opening wide with wonder, was I seriously proposing to travel?
I walked over to yet another drawer of my desk, also locked, and extracted something, concealing it behind my back, daring her to guess. An elephant? Wrong! A flying carpet? Wrong! An invisibility cloak? Wrong!
She came to kiss me and then snatched what I had in my hands and squealed like a monkey.
“A passport! How . . . ?”
“Well, I couldn’t tell you about this, could I, given that you supposedly didn’t even know a visitor was invading my—”
“Fitz, let’s not go there.”
Right! So I explained that, after abandoning my experiments in Photoshopping for most of the last two years, I had recently returned to them, concerned that if my love were to have another crisis or needed urgent care some place faraway, I needed an ID. The techniques of image manipulation had, using the very patent that made us rich, taken great strides forward. Many nights, while Cam slept—or was she just feigning that as well?—I had, starting from that old picture of myself at fourteen, constructed a model of how I looked now, like a plastic surgeon operating on his own face in front of a mirror. I did not confess to Cam that there was a certain perverse pleasure in this exercise of slowly aging the digital image—fuck you, Henri, look at me recover my identity in spite of you, look at me force the picture to conform to what Cam and my family see. But more important than the gratification at excluding my enemy was the certainty that this was my ticket to freedom.
“My doctored photo,” I said to Cam. “It fooled the bureaucrats, they promptly approved the passport.”
Great, but public places, Cam cautioned, were still perilous. If anything, she said, her exploration of human zoos had made her even more fearful, oversensitive to what might happen if powerful people ever learned about the image that was haunting me. Just as Virchow had measured the skulls and Von Bischoff had prodded the genitals, so there had to be many scientists who would love to get their hands on someone like me to experiment on, unravel a phenomenon that had no rational explanation. “I know them, Fitzroy,” she said fervently. “They’ll be out to extract some commercial value from your tragedy, Henri’s tragedy. We’ll only travel if absolutely necessary, if the rewards outweigh the risks.”
Zurich, I argued, returning to my initial idea, seemed to fit the bill. If we could find the body of Henri and the others who died there, if we could retrieve them and carry them home, reverse the journey they had taken over 110 years ago, if we could then give them burial on the island from which they had been abducted, if we could find some relative who—“A lot of ifs,” Cam objected. “I doubt that anyone knows where those bodies were buried—though I’ll admit that this was why I was going to Zurich after Berlin, to complete the investigation. But let’s say the bodies can be located, what right do we have to ask for an exhumation, let alone cart them away? It would be kidnapping them all over again, even if we had the best intentions—just like Hagenbeck who, after all, claimed he was educating the public, providing a service to science. And you’d end up in the spotlight. No, Fitzroy Foster—good try, but there’s got to be something more feasible.”
Over the next weeks we searched for another project. Go to Europe, confront the Hagenbeck relatives in Hamburg and whatever Pierre Petit descendants we might be able to find in Paris, enlisting them in some sort of private or even public act of penance. But if it had taken me eleven years to begin to decipher that my visitor might not be an enemy but perhaps a collaborator with benign intentions, how difficult, then, would it be to convince those distant members of my family to assume responsibility for something they had not personally done?
Then Cam timidly came up with the idea of working with Survival International, following my mother’s example. But it made me uncomfortable. Undoubtedly, the best way of redressing a wrong done in the past was, as Mom had put it, to make sure it was not repeated in the future—and yet, that solution was too abstruse and self-satisfying, too removed from Henri’s individual suffering and story. Save an Indian now to compensate for one massacred a century ago. No, whatever we came up with had to address his life, his motives, his extinction. We would have many decades ahead of us to make the world a better place. There was only one October 12, 1992, and we had to do something that explicitly focused on that special date and dealt with my special visitor.
Cam responded to this demurral on my part by designing a gigantic cage, which she proposed to build in front of some major institution that had profited from the exploitation of Henri—like the Hagenbeck zoo or the Jardin d’Acclimatation or the Berlin Museum or even some bank where the profits from these human zoos had been deposited—and she, Camilla Foster Wood, intended to dress up like a native Patagon and there, half naked, gnaw on bones and utter guttural sounds and—It was so easy to shoot down her initiative that I felt a surge of pity as I said: “How about me? I’m the one who’s haunted and you’re exposing yourself? If this—this happening—were to work, well, I’d have to be in the cage with you, be photographed by any passerby and be carted off to jail as a public nuisance. And besides, Cam, we can never be Henri, we can’t really replicate his ordeal. Because, my dear, we can escape from that cage whenever we want. Now, if you really wish to turn into him, go with me to Patagonia and live with what remains of his tribe, spend the rest of our life trying to become a Kaweshkar Indian. I think that’s nuts, but at least it isn’t a performance, at least it would be the real thing. Only problem is that I don’t believe it’s what he wants.”
All our incoherent plans led us back, always back, to the same question. What does he want?
Forcing us to realize that we needed to draw even closer to him, at least try to understand where he had come from, what sort of life he would have led if Hagenbeck had not created human zoos, if Columbus had not stepped on an island he did not yet know was part of a new world.
Let Henri guide us. Give him whatever agency we could in this quest. Make him part of it.
And that was the reason why, toward mid-February 1992, Cam returned to the Harvard Library to find an answer to our problem in books and materials and maps.
And came back with a different sort of problem.
Mrs. Hudson, the librarian, after congratulating Cam on her recovery, had suggested they go to the cafeteria, where she confided, in a conspiratorial whisper, that an official from a government agency had come by a few months ago, in early November of last year, to inquire about the books and documents Miss Wood, later Mrs. Foster, had requested in 1988–89. When Mrs. Hudson had refused, citing client confidentiality, the administration had intervened and ordered her to cooperate, for reasons, they said, of national security. She had complied with the bibliography, not allowing the man, however, to take the books from the library’s premises. This agent, Danny Makaruska, he said his name was, returned the next day accompanied by an older man who had spent hours perusing those volumes and taking notes and often photos. A strange fellow, a bit creepy, Mrs. Hudson commented, and sad, as if perpetually on the verge of tears.
Cam had asked if the man was tall, gaunt, bald, with redrimmed eyes? Yes, that was right! A melancholy man, very silent, hunched over his labors, very concentrated. The agent had referred to him, quite deferentially, as Doctor.
“Dr. Downey,” I said.
“It’s got to be him. Ernest Downey. How did you guess?”
I told her about his visit to our home on November 9 of last year, a date coinciding with this stranger’s incursion into the vaults of the Harvard Library.
“Why do you think he’s stalking me, him and this—this Makaruska agent?”
Later that evening, we held an emergency family meeting. Even if Dad disapproved of any initiative of ours that might presume Henri was a friendly force, he was even more infuriated by the idea that someone was shadowing us.
“How dare the bastard go snooping around!” Dad exploded. “I’ve a good mind to seek him out and—no wonder he gave me the jitters. National security? I very much doubt it!”
We agreed, however, that it would be better not to alert Dr. Downey that we were onto his spying.
“Maybe he thought there was some sort of clue in those books as to where my scientific research was going,” Cam ventured. “That’s what he seemed obsessed with when we met briefly in Paris.”
It was something that also obsessed me. Ever since she had awoken from her false amnesia attack I had started to press her to resume her work, retrieve all that lost time. More so now that it seemed that this Downey fellow was out to steal her ideas.
“So what? If he finds the gene that allows visual memory to be transmitted from one generation to the next, good for him, great for science, terrific for us. But listen, even if he—or I—were to find the link inside someone’s DNA, that still won’t solve the enigma of your visitor. It will just depict how he did it, how nature did it, how memories transfer. These years you keep calling lost have, in fact, helped me to realize a fallacy in science: we keep thinking that if we uncover the how of something we’ll have solved its mystery, get it to speak. But Henri will still be silent, we’ll still not understand what he wants and why. I’ve brought back more books and material from the library, on the Kaweshkar, their language, their history, their customs, their spiritual ceremonies. We’ll never get inside Henri, see the world as he did, that would be so arrogant, to presume that we can abolish time and history, undo our own identity and desire, turn into natives, in fact impossible to embody him entirely, possess him all over again, but we can essay a respectful approximation, that’s where we have to put our energies. Chromosomes will always be there, ready for exploration.”
All through the next month and a half, as we plunged into everything published about the Kaweshkar—so much written about a tribe that did not itself have writing, that believed in words that were hurled into the wind and kept alive by the waves and the rocks and the birds—I kept bringing up how strongly I felt that she should at least set up an appointment at MIT and see if some sort of job might be open, and she kept on postponing such an interview. Until one day, I cornered her: “I think you’re afraid that your research is no longer valid, no matter how much you say that you don’t care, and I’d be the first to grant that such a fear is legitimate, Cam, but look at it from my perspective: every day that passes makes me feel guiltier for having blocked your career. So, please, even if it’s just to allay my own remorse, please, please, speak to your friends at the lab.”
My anguish convinced her—and she came back in mid-April from MIT, with an expression that hesitated between joy and concern. The good news was that she was welcome to start right away, collaborating with the genome project. The bad news was—who did I think was in charge of this unit, parachuting in from Stanford?
“Downey,” I said.
“Downey,” she confirmed. As soon as he'd been informed that she was requesting a job interview, he’d mentioned how eager his team would be to fit her in, in view of her pioneering work at the Institut Pasteur. He would, in fact, be visiting soon, and had expressed an interest in getting reacquainted, hoping to take Mrs. Foster and her husband out to dinner when he was next in the Boston area.
Cam had not lost her cool for one instant, playing along, accepting the relayed invitation, but not just yet, as she would only be returning to work later in the year—she lied to them as she had lied to me, feigning that she was not completely well, under doctor’s orders to go easy on strenuous mental and social activities.
“I wanted to consult you first, Fitz,” Cam said. “Should I set up a meeting to sound him out?”
“No way,” I responded. “I don’t like the idea of you even getting near that weirdo.”
“So how can we find out what he’s really up to?”
Neither of us would budge—adventurous Cam against cautious Fitzroy. Fortunately, Vic was home from Chicago Law School for Easter holidays and he solved the impasse. A classmate, Laura—and he blushed at her name, so we realized he was studying more than jurisdiction with the girl—was the daughter of Barry Cunningham, a former police captain who had set up a private eye agency. Why not turn the tables on this mysterious Downey and scrutinize his past and intentions?
By early May Cunningham, a beefy, affable man with brows so bushy they almost overshadowed the mischievous sparkle in his eyes, sat in our living room with a preliminary report.
There had been nothing furtive about Downey’s research until a few years ago, when he had suddenly moved from epidemiology and public health studies—he had been instrumental, along with the Institut Pasteur, in discovering the cause of AIDS—into the diverse area of visual memory and its genealogical transmission. That recent research was classified as top secret by the Pentagon and Pharma2001, the gigantic German-American company, the entities subsidizing Downey’s work. So Cunningham had told the detective assigned to the case to back off, though feelers had gone out to a contact in the FBI for further information.
Laura’s father was able to provide, nevertheless, compelling details about Downey’s personal life.
At about the time Downey had switched his field of interest, a corresponding sea change had occurred in his character. From a cheerful, amiable, back-slapping colleague, considerate with others to a fault, he had transmogrified into a misanthrope, fanatical about his work, haughty and difficult to deal with. And then, suddenly, a few months after this remarkable transformation, tragedy had struck the scientist’s family in Palo Alto. He had come home one evening and found both his wife Anna and his eighteen-year-old daughter Evelyn dead, hanging from two belts. That double suicide pact had deepened the shift in Downey’s personality, made him even more introspective and lugubrious. And he had thrown himself into his work with fury, the only consolation left to a man whom everybody agreed was beyond brilliant, a perennial candidate for a Nobel Prize in Medicine.
“Yes, yes, yes,” Cam said. “That’s it, that’s got to be it!”
Before we could even guess what she meant, she asked Barry Cunningham to please dig up details about Downey’s lineage, as well as his wife’s, back at least five generations. And would say nothing more on the matter till, two weeks later, Dad received a packet from the detective agency—at his office, as Barry had intimated that our house might be under surveillance.
“I knew it,” Cam exclaimed when we had finished reading. “No wonder she killed herself.”
“Who?”
“Downey’s daughter. No wonder her mother . . .”
I read through the report again, passed it to Dad.
Ernest Downey descended directly from a famous photographer, William Ernest Downey. Born in 1829, a favorite of Queen Victoria’s, he’d immortalized Prince Albert, the whole royal family, and innumerable viscounts and earls and notables of that age. Awarded a Royal Warrant in 1879, most of his fortune, like Pierre Petit’s, had come from postcards. Our Dr. Downey’s grandfather had been the grandson of this original Downey.
“Fitz, Jerry! See? The sixth generation! Evelyn! And look at her mother Anna’s side!”
Anna Farini prided herself on tracing her ancestry back to William Leopold Hunt, known far and wide as the Great Farini, a Canadian who had been one of the world’s great showmen and acrobats in the late nineteenth century. He had walked a tightrope across Niagara Falls on stilts with a fat woman on his back while juggling swords and soon became famous for daring circus performances with Lulu, a boy who, for years, had been disguised as a girl. Farini had eventually reinvented himself as a major entrepreneur in London, displaying freaks and bringing friendly Zulus from Africa to the Royal Aquarium. Besides adopting Lulu as his son, Farini had two boys of his own, one of whom was the great-great-grandfather of Anna, Downey’s wife. The Great Farini fathered no daughters but had given his name to a girl from Laos.
“Don’t you see, don’t you?” Cam was beside herself with excitement. “A notorious showman and circus entrepreneur on one side of the family and an eminent photographer on the other, their blood coming together after all those generations, just like you. So it’s got to be—yes, yes, yes, that’s what it’s got to be. Lulu or the girl from Laos or . . . Wait, wait, wait.”
And before Dad or I could question her further, she was out the door. Dad grinned at me. “Married life,” he said. “I think she’s terrific.”
I spent the rest of the day perusing the report again. Evelyn Downey’s genealogy resembled mine to a depressing degree. Had Petit crossed paths with this first Downey, did Hagenbeck have dealings with the flamboyant Farini?
Dad and I were preparing dinner, had laid the table, when Cam breezed back in, pushed aside plates and cutlery and plopped a large book down, opening it to a page marked with a feather.
An image stared out at us.
“Krao,” she said. “Gentlemen, please meet Krao Farini as photographed by William Ernest Downey in 1882.”
The sight struck dread into my heart. The child—perhaps seven or eight—was almost entirely covered with a dense coating of soft black hair about a quarter of an inch long, through which a brown-olive skin gleamed faintly here and there. Her cheeks were full and pouched, made more gruesome by a low and short nose with excessive nostrils. Though hunched forward in an apelike pose, her eyes were large and beautiful, sad and immensely human.
Cam turned to another page.
Krao had two arms and one leg wrapped around a distinguished bearded gentleman—the Great Farini, my wife announced triumphantly. This time the girl was clothed in pajamas, forlorn as she clung to her adoptive father. He responded by holding her tenderly, carefully, like a doll.
Next page.
Krao by herself again, fully clothed, showing off teeth which seemed more like those of an animal than of a female child, sharp and separated, a grimace meant to ingratiate but mostly repulsive. With those eyes, those eyes.
Cam explained that Norwegian explorer Carl Bock had heard on one of his Asian trips that there were tribes of these savages deep in the Laotian jungle, akin to apes, the possible missing link of Darwinian fame. In 1881, Farini paid for a new expedition by Bock to bring back a specimen: none other than Krao, called thus due to the plaintive cry emitted by her tribesmen when she was forcibly separated from them. This little orphan (her father, abducted along with her, had died on the trip to Europe and the mother had been forbidden to travel by the king of Siam—the same one made notorious by the musical The King and I) had caused an unparalleled sensation in London and later in the States and—“get this,” Cam enthused, “was examined by good old Virchow and Von Bischoff.” Despite the latter testifying that the girl was not a missing link, simply born with a sickness known as hypertrichosis, she continued to be billed as “Living Proof of Darwin’s Theory of the Descent of Man,” drawing hundreds of thousands of spectators till the end of her days at the age of fifty-four.
“A very intelligent girl,” Cam went on, “who spoke, in adulthood, many languages, and was described by fellow performers as one of the sweetest people alive. What is strange is that all accounts describe her as content with her lot—whether this is true or not, we have no way of knowing. But that she might be happy is strange.”
“Strange? Why?”
“Because she haunted Evelyn Downey. That’s why Evelyn killed herself. Didn’t you almost commit suicide?”
“Yes.”
Dad gasped. He must have suspected that I’d contemplated taking my life, but, like so many of my secrets, we had skirted talking about this one.
“And wouldn’t you have done so if, instead of Henri, the photo were that of a disgusting child that seemed an animal, would your sanity have withstood an invasion by someone like Krao, if you felt that ape-child crawling inside you, demanding sympathy?”
“I’d rather die.”
“And the mother, Anna,” Dad asked, “what about her?”
“The difference with your family and Downey’s is that they knew right away about the ancestry, the past was not a blur for them as it was for you Fosters. Imagine Anna when she realizes that the freak the Great Farini kidnapped was colonizing her daughter, seething inside her own child.”
“And another difference,” I said. “Downey. As a doctor, he—”
“Must have decided to experiment, run tests on her, find out how these incursions transpired. And when he lost his loved ones he persisted, tried to turn his tragedy into a major scientific achievement.”
“He went mad,” my father said. “That I understand.”
“He went mad,” Cam said. “And he’s dangerous. Don’t you see, guys? If we’ve been able to track him down, well, what doesn’t he know about us, given his means? We hunt down Henri and his victimizers, he hunts us down. He knows, Fitz, he’s discovered who you are. Once someone like me has established the genealogy, anyone following my itinerary will deduce why I’m doing this, find out I have a husband who drops out of sight, out of camera range, at puberty. Downey knows what that means, his daughter must have had some sort of sexual experience as an adolescent that triggered this, made her feel she was to blame. But that’s not all, my dears.”
We waited expectantly.
“If you are not a solitary phenomenon, if Evelyn repeats your visitation, there must be others. You’re not alone, Fitzroy Foster. Who knows how many men and women are also haunted by ghosts from the past, just waiting for us to find them.”