WHEN CHRISTOPHER OPENED THE FRONT DOOR OF HIS HOUSE IN Washington and saw Zarah for the first time, he spoke to her in German: “Lebst du noch?”
“What? I don’t understand,” Zarah replied, looking straight into his eyes. She was a self-possessed young woman dressed for business: tailored suit, white blouse with one simple pin at the throat, low-heeled shoes, pink lips and fingernails, her mother’s wedding ring on her right middle finger, a plain watch on her wrist.
This fashionable disguise could not conceal her intense physical attractiveness, but Christopher, even while he stared at her with something like hunger in his eyes, seemed oblivious to it. He was looking at, or for, something else in her face and body. Finally he said, “I’m sorry; forgive me. For a moment I mistook you for somebody else.”
“My grandmother, I think. I’m told that I resemble her quite closely.”
She spoke in Lori Christopher’s incisive tones, but if Christopher heard what she said, he gave no sign. They looked at each other in silence. It was late morning in a neighborhood in which wives and husbands alike practiced one of the saprophytic Washington professions, law or journalism or politics, and a deep hush hung over the street of empty houses, as if everyone for miles around except Christopher had gone to a funeral.
She said, “May I come in?”
He stepped aside. Zarah came into the hall; it was even quieter inside than out. No radio or television played in another room, no household machines hummed in the kitchen or the cellar. Going inside was like crossing the threshold between imagination and reality. She thought, That’s exactly what I’m doing after all these years. She looked around her. It was a high, narrow house, but filled with dappled sunlight that fell first through a very large oak tree growing on the curb and then through tall Palladian windows. Beyond the double door leading into the sitting room she saw Zaentz’s drawing of Lori hanging on the wall and strode across the carpet to examine it. She had Lori’s purposeful walk, and when she turned around after scrutinizing the picture, a process that took several minutes, Christopher saw that she had the same gravely inquisitive expression, the same wide-open unwavering gray eyes. He asked her no questions, expressed no surprise; standing politely in the doorway, he waited for her to explain herself.
“Yes, there is a close resemblance,” she said. “This was made when your mother was what—nineteen?”
“About that age.”
“Years younger than I am now.” Zarah spoke English with a native American intonation, but with the faint hint of some other, more strongly aspirated language also present. She said, “Was that German you spoke to me on the doorstep?”
“Yes, it was German.”
“What did the words mean?”
He hesitated for a moment, looking very intently at her face, and replied, “The English equivalent is, ‘Are you still alive?’ “
His voice was very soft; she had to strain to hear the words.
Zarah said, “Do you often speak German when you’re surprised?”
“I haven’t spoken it in twenty years. The words just came out.”
Zarah stared at him, unblinking. “I’ve imagined your first words to me many times,” she said. “But I never expected anything like that. Can we sit down? I don’t think my legs will hold me up very much longer.”
She sat on the bench of a piano beneath the picture of Lori. Christopher remained standing in the doorway. Framed photographs crowded the gleaming mahogany lid of the piano: sepia portraits of Christopher and his parents and relatives; a slim dark-haired woman with a nervous face, his second wife, holding a pretty female child who closely resembled her; the child by herself on a horse, on a boat, standing on the balustrade above the Place de la Concorde with Christopher’s arm around her and the Arc de Triomphe in the far background at the end of the Champs-Ely sees. He was looking upward at the little girl with an expression of love on his face. Zarah looked away. The room ran the whole length of the house, like a gallery, and through the french windows at the back Zarah could see a garden with swings and slides and a doll-house. Both walls were hung with drawings, prints, and paintings. She had studied such things with one of her tutors, and she recognized a Pissarro, a Constable, a Munch, and a flame-filled shipping scene that seemed to be a Turner intermixed with two or three unrecognizable abstractions and one naive Douanier Rousseau-like picture showing lions and leopards lying down with farm animals and blond children dressed in gossamer togas.
“What is that picture?” she asked.
“It’s by an American painter named Hicks,” Christopher replied.
“I like it. I like them all.”
“Most of them belong to my cousin. He lives abroad.”
“Which cousin is that?”
“Horace Hubbard.”
“Elliott’s son?”
“That’s right.”
Just as Zarah had always been told, her father was, physically, a male version of herself, but far stiller. Framed like a portrait by the doorway, he was nearly as motionless as a figure in a painting—one of John Singer Sargent’s would-be gentry posed on a platform above the artist except for the total absence of disdain and the rumpled clothes (old yellow corduroy pants, a checked shirt under a threadbare sweater). He seemed younger than she knew him to be. His hair was darker than she had pictured it, but it had not begun to turn gray. His well-made body had not thickened, no veins showed on his hands which hung quietly along the seams of his trousers. His face was weatherburned, like the face of a Ja’wabi of the same generation who had spent his youth in the saddle—but tan instead of olive.
“Do you want me to explain myself?” she asked.
Christopher smiled for the first time, faintly; he seemed to be amused by the question.
“Does that mean yes?” she asked.
“I’m a little curious.”
“That’s a relief. Can you sit down, too?”
He motioned to two facing sofas in front of a fireplace. They sat down opposite each other.
“I’ve rehearsed all this,” she said, “but I don’t think the performance is necessary. I think you can see who I am even if you can’t quite believe it. I’m not sure I believe it, either, but here we are. I learned of your existence by accident when I was eight years old. I overheard my mother talking to Barney Wolkowicz …”
Christopher’s eyes changed; the good humor went out of them.
“… who came to tell her that you were in prison in China. By that time you’d been a prisoner for years; it took him a long time to find us. I don’t know how he did it. Or why. Nobody else ever did. He just rode over the mountains and knocked on the door one day. My mother was infuriated. She hadn’t even told her own parents where we were, or that I existed.”
“You’re Cathy’s child?”
“Yes. She went into hiding when she found out she was pregnant, to keep me a secret from you. I was born twenty-three years ago on April tenth, if you want to do the arithmetic. Do you find that too strange to believe?”
Christopher closed his eyes briefly. Opening them again he said, “No.”
“You’ve thought about her, then?”
“Yes. Often. She was the most beautiful human being I ever knew.”
“So everyone said. She hated it. Is that all you remember?”
“No. Far from it. I hope she’s well.”
“She’s dead,” Zarah said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t betray her in this way.”
ZARAH HAD BROUGHT SEBASTIAN LAUX ALONG AS A WITNESS. THEY had driven down from New York together in Sebastian’s Bentley, and he had waited around the corner in the parked car while she made herself known to her father. He rang the doorbell at twelve-thirty precisely. His chauffeur stood behind him on the steps with a picnic hamper in one hand, a silver wine bucket in the other, and a plump old-fashioned briefcase, the kind with straps, under his arm. “We left the city at five-thirty in the morning in order to get here in time for lunch,” Sebastian said. To him, New York was “the city”; all other urban agglomerations were known by their proper names. Even more than most New Yorkers, Sebastian was uncomfortable in Washington. He could not be persuaded to spend a night there or eat the local food or drink the water. When he could not avoid a trip to the capital he had himself driven from Manhattan, a ten-hour round trip, in case the airlines and the trains failed or went on strike at the same time, trapping him in this strange disembodied metropolis of lethargic clerks and fried fish.
“Shall we eat in the garden?” Sebastian asked. “I think we have everything we need.” He looked upward at the leafy canopy, which was just beginning to be touched by the first colors of fall. “It’s a lovely day. The trees are wonderful in Washington, one always notices that.”
On his way through the house he paused in the gallery to look at the pictures and the worn Afshãri carpets on the floor. He was on familiar ground here because he had bought and furnished the house for Christopher while the latter was in captivity. “Ah, Harvey Hubbard’s Cappadocian fountain!” he said when he stepped outdoors into the garden. “Does it still work?”
Christopher turned a faucet; water gushed from a small Roman fountain that an archeologizing cousin had excavated in Caesarea Mazaca during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.
“Imagine tucking this beautiful thing away in an attic,” Sebastian said. “But that’s where we found it!”
While he examined its ancient dolphins anew, the chauffeur, an elderly, silent Cockney who also acted as Sebastian’s butler and valet, changed into an apron, covered a small table with a checkered cloth from the hamper, and laid out the delicatessen luncheon that Sebastian had brought with him: smoked trout, chicken in aspic, string beans in vinaigrette, strawberries, crème fraîche, a liter of French mineral water, and a brown bottle of Alsatian Gewürztraminer. They sat down in the shade of an umbrella.
“Paul is not fond of wines that have German names,” said Sebastian to Zarah, lifting his green-stemmed glass, “but this is exceptional even after five hours in the trunk of the car. It was your grandfather Christopher’s favorite wine, my dear. He wrote a poem about it. ‘Perfume of Bacchus, evaporating on the tongue of memory.’ I think you’ll like it.”
For the remainder of the lunch they talked about the pictures and the rugs inside the house; Sebastian had definite opinions about such things. He did not like tribal carpets. He did not like abstractions, either; he himself had bought the Munch as a wedding present for Hubbard and Lori Christopher; he liked that, and not only because he had got it for a song. “Munch had potential, you could see that,” he said. “In a hundred years no one will look at blobs and splotches. Faces and bodies, that’s what pictures are all about.” He was in his seventies now. None of his habits had changed, and as an old man he looked and behaved very much as he had done in Paris half a century before. He never mixed food and business, but as soon as the servant cleared the table and disappeared with the repacked hamper, Sebastian drew a gold watch from the breast pocket of his suit and put on his reading glasses.
“One-thirty. Time to get down to business if I’m going to miss the traffic on my way back to the city,” he said. “I’m sure you’re wondering, Paul, how all this came to pass, and if you can believe the evidence of your eyes. I don’t blame you. The resemblance between this young lady and your mother at the same age is astonishing. Lori wasn’t quite as tall or as fair-haired as Zarah, your mother’s hair was almost auburn, but otherwise it was like being revisited by a ghost from the past when she came to see me for the first time.”
“When was that?” Christopher asked.
“About a year ago, but of course the Bank has known about Zarah since before she was born.”
“You are the Bank.”
Sebastian returned his steady gaze. “D. & D. Laux & Co. has always handled her mother’s account. And her parents’ before her.”
“You’ve never mentioned any of this to me, Sebastian.”
“Catherine did not desire it. Obviously I am bound in these matters by the client’s wishes. Now that Zarah has inherited she wants to make herself known to you. I am here at her request to assure you that in my opinion, based on all the information at my disposal, she is exactly what she represents herself to be—the daughter of your former wife.”
“And mine.”
“That certanly was Catherine’s belief.” Sebastian turned to Zarah. “Do you still wish to pursue this question in my presence?”
Zarah looked first at him, then at Christopher. “Yes,” she said. “That’s why you’re here.”
“If that’s why you’re here, Sebastian, I guess you’d better get on with it.”
“Very well. As you doubtless know, there now exist tests by which paternity can be proved or disproved with almost complete certainty. I believe they compare DNA samples. I have given Zarah the name of a specialist here in Washington who can help you if you wish. Now for the circumstantial case.”
Sebastian unbuckled his briefcase, opened the lock with a tiny key attached to the watch-chain wound through the buttonhole in his lapel, and extracted a manila file tied with a cloth tape. From this he produced a number of documents and laid them neatly in a row on the table before him.
“There were reliable witnesses to Zarah Christopher’s birth,” he said. “In fact she was delivered personally by a woman in whom I have absolute trust. This is her affidavit, recorded a day or two after the event.” He laid one of the documents in front of Christopher, who read it. It was a clinical description, written in lucid French, of Zarah’s birth, which had taken place in a tent during a journey across the Idáren Dráren.
Christopher lifted his eyes. “This is signed ‘M. Laux.’ “
“My wife,” Sebastian said.
“I didn’t know you had a wife.”
“You knew her well when you were a child in Berlin—Meryem.”
“Meryem was your wife? Did my parents know that?”
“They were the only ones who did know.”
“She’s still living?”
“Yes. I haven’t seen her since 1939.”
“But you correspond.”
“Meryem has her own ways of keeping in touch.”
Sebastian gave Christopher another document. “There is room for doubt as to the date of conception inasmuch as you and Catherine, though still legally married, were no longer living as man and wife when it occurred. Here is an affidavit by Catherine as to time and place and certain other pertinent details.”
Christopher had not seen Cathy’s handwriting in more than twenty years, but he recognized it at once: the self-conscious backslanting letters climbing up the page, the circular dots over the “i’s,” the ornate capitals. She provided the date of her last menses, which had taken place fifteen days before conception. Letters attesting her pregnancy from the doctors she had visited in Geneva and Paris were attached.
“Does that accord with your recollection?” Sebastian asked.
“Yes. Completely.”
Sebastian put a finger on Meryem’s affidavit. “Meryem tells us that Zarah was a twin. As she wrote, the other child, a boy, was stillborn; he was buried near the place where he was born; apparently the grave still exists. She describes a very unusual complication in regard to the stillborn twin. The medical term is fetus papyraceus. Here is a passage from one of your father’s novels, The Small Rain, published in 1928.”
Sebastian handed Christopher the open book; the paragraph in question was marked with a paper clip:
Still coated in blood and mucus the glorious boy opened his eyes and looked for the first time at his mother who said Dear God he spoke to me, he said where is my twin. But there was no twin except that there almost always was a twin in this family, but this time the other child was a fetus papyraceus with a girl’s face as beautiful as the boy’s own face, which was their mother’s face in small, imprinted on the tissue of her body, and it had been pressed absolutely flat in the womb by the child that lived.
“This passage is a description of your own birth,” Sebastian said. “Hubbard told me so himself when the book was published; also that this complication, in which one twin dies in the womb and is pressed flat by the other as it grows and develops, has occurred several times in the Christopher family. Your father’s fiction, as I’m sure you realize, was really not fiction at all, but a sort of embellished diary, an imaginative rendering of the literal events of his life. He redecorated the scenery, he sometimes resorted to metaphor, but never departed from the essential facts. In that, as in so many other things, he was far ahead of his time.”
Soon it was two-thirty, time for Sebastian to go. He closed his briefcase and rose to his feet.
“Paul will see me out,” he said, holding out his hand to Zarah. “I’ll say goodbye to you here, by this fountain. It would be wonderful to have one like it in Tifawt, in one of those garden courtyards, wouldn’t it?”
“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.”
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.
“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.
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.
Despite their physical resemblance, few would have taken them at this moment for father and daughter. The blood test had freed Zarah of all shyness, and as Cathy had feared and Stephanie had foreseen, she was behaving toward Christopher like a girl who had just become engaged to be married and therefore had a right to know the whole truth about his life before they met. She led Christopher to a bench and began to ask questions, beginning with the details of his imprisonment in China. He answered lamely. Zarah paused.
“Would you rather not be asked about this?” she asked. “Am I going too fast? Does it remind you too much of what you went through?”
“It’s not that. I’m just out of the habit of answering questions.”
This was the fact. By the time Zarah appeared on his doorstep Christopher had lived in inviolable privacy for nearly ten years, a period almost exactly equivalent to the time he had spent in prison. Ever since his return from China he had been treated like a man risen from the dead who knew things that no human being ought to know. No one asked him questions about himself. In early days Stephanie had satisfied her curiosity as Zarah was doing now, but no one else had trespassed onto this forbidden ground. Patchen had kept the Outfit snoops away, and in private life Christopher’s friends, and even people who would ordinarily have been his enemies, seemed to think that he would somehow slip back into the nether world of his captivity if he described what had happened to him there.
“I don’t really want to know everything,” Zarah said. “Just some of the details, so I can compare what really happened to what I invented about you.”
“From what you’ve told me already, the two are a lot alike,” Christopher replied.
“That was because I didn’t really invent these things. I had the book Barney gave me. And Lla Kahina saw you in the cards all the time. I just took it from there.”
“She saw me in the cards?”
“You find that hard to believe?”
“Tell me what you mean.”
“She saw you. For example, did you have a very large book with a blue cover that you read every night in your cell?”
“Yes. The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary.”
“Is that what it was? We thought it must be the Bible. When you were interrogated, did you write answers on a stone floor with chalk?”
“Yes. It’s part of their technique.”
“You’ve told me that your hard labor, day after day, consisted of digging a deep ditch that had no purpose. Did this ditch collapse in an earthquake, almost burying you alive?”
“Yes.”
“And did someone in the hospital give you an orange to eat when you regained consciousness?”
“Yes.”
“Lla Kahina saw all that. She said you were a very strong presence, always appearing when she got out the cards, always insisting that she take notice of you. That was how she found my mother in the first place; you appeared in the cards and told her about me.”
“But I didn’t know about you.”
“Not in real life, but she sees another world in which the dead and the living are all mixed up together. I think Lla Kahina believes that this person she called by your name is really your mother, speaking through you. She thinks your mother is in me, too; she never said so, but I know that’s what she believed. Do you find that hard to accept?”
“That she would believe those things, no. She and your grandmother were very close.”
“But you’ve just said that the things she saw happening to you in the cards actually happened in real life. How do you explain her knowing what was going on in a prison in Manchuria, ten thousand miles from where she was?”
“Unless she had spies among the guards, I can’t explain it.”
“No spies. But you still don’t believe it.”
“Why shouldn’t I? It’s all true. I only wish she had come to see me—in person. Then I might have known as much about you as you know about me.”
They smiled at each other; Christopher’s smile was in no way muscular, not brilliant like Zarah’s, but a subtle change of facial expression, a more humorous light in the eyes.
“I see what you mean,” Zarah said. “Maybe you should have had some cards of your own.”
“Tell me what I would have seen.”
“Not much; I led a very quiet life.”
She told him the basic facts: Cathy had taught her to play the piano and ride; Lla Kahina had taught her Berber and Arabic and the history of the Ja’wabi; the Ja’wabi had taught her the ways of the desert. A long procession of tutors hired by D. & D. Laux & Co. had come to Tifawt and guided her through the core curriculums of the famous school and liberal arts college Cathy had attended, and well beyond.
“I think my schooling was based on what Mother read about Lori’s education in Hubbard’s novels,” Zarah said. “God knows what she thought she was creating, or for what purpose. I sure didn’t.”
She knew European music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, English, American, and European history and literature, the Bible and the Koran, philosophy from Socrates to Heidegger, Western politics from Suetonius to Marx, mathematics through calculus, and five languages including the Mandarin she had learned at Wolkowicz’s suggestion. Also the fundamentals of anatomy and internal medicine, subjects she had chosen for herself because they interested her.
“Why medicine?” Christopher asked.
“I thought I might have to nurse you after the Chinese let you go.”
Because Zarah had never been inside a formal schoolroom, she had no diplomas or certificates; no memberships; no connections; no physical reminders of the process of learning; no identity in the terms of reference used by the modern world. Her tutors had known her under her mother’s maiden name. Cathy had not even registered her birth, and one of the things Sebastian had done for her was to present the evidence of her existence and nationality to another of the Bank’s clients, an official of the Consular Service, who issued an American passport in her true name.
“It’s lucky Lla Kahina is an American citizen; they wouldn’t have taken a foreigner’s word for it,” Zarah said. “According to Sebastian the man from the government said I was a perfect secret agent. A sleeper, Barney would have called me.”
“You remember that word after all these years?”
“Yes, and lots of other things Barney taught me. If it hadn’t been for him I might never have found you. Can we talk about him?”
“Another day, if you don’t mind.”
Christopher had said this before when she asked about Wolkowicz; she did not press the point.
Christopher said, “You don’t think Meryem would have told you the truth even if there had been no Barney?”
“I’m not sure. My mother said she was hiding me from you because there’s a curse on the Christophers. I think Lla Kahina may agree with her about that. Why else would she have taken us in and put up with my mother all those years?”
“Maybe she just liked your mother.”
“I don’t think that was the reason. You don’t blame Cathy in the slightest degree for what she did to you and me, do you?”
“No. What would be the point?”
“Yes.” He smiled again in his quiet way. “I remember that part very well.”
“Why did you love her? Was it because she was so beautiful?”
“That was part of it; most of it at first. Her looks affected everything. That was what troubled her. She wouldn’t have put it this way, but I think she felt she was under an enchantment, that her beauty was some sort of cruel disguise imposed on her by the fates. She couldn’t believe that anyone could see beyond it, or through it, and find within it the person she thought she really was.”
“But you found the person inside the disguise.”
“I don’t know. Obviously she didn’t think so.”
“You seem to have no curiosity about her. Don’t you wonder what her life was like after you said goodbye?”
“It’s pretty obvious she didn’t want me to know that.”
“And you feel you have to respect her wishes even after she’s dead?”
“Yes.”
Zarah started to reply, but she was interrupted by a beggar. Zarah gave him a dollar; he shuffled away. She resumed her line of questioning.
“Sebastian’s documents have made me wonder about the circumstances of my conception,” she said. “You were already separated when it happened, apparently.”
“Yes.”
“Did you think about her at all afterward?”
“Of course I did. But I never suspected your existence.”
“You never thought there might be a child?”
“I wondered. It was an unguarded moment.”
“Wondered or feared?”
“Both. By then it was obvious that we couldn’t stay together.”
“You never thought she might have wanted to entrap you?”
“Entrap me? No. That was the farthest thing from her mind under the circumstances.”
“What were the circumstances?”
Christopher compressed his lips, shook his head. Zarah thought that he might refuse to go on, but he answered the question.
“She had been badly hurt,” he said. “What happened happened in the hospital, before she went in for surgery. She thought she might die. So did I. It was what she wanted.”
“What did you want? Did you still love her when it happened?” Christopher looked into her large gray eyes, the family eyes; they glistened with tears. “How else could such a thing have happened at all?” he asked.
WHEN THE CHRISTOPHERS HAD GUESTS TO DINNER THEY SET UP THE table in the long gallery-like room in which the pictures hung and turned on the lights over the frames. For Zarah’s party Stephanie had taken the plate out of its storage bags; a cold poached salmon and chicken breasts in aspic were displayed on glittering silver dishes arranged on a sideboard.
“No red meat is served in this house, ever; Stephanie is hell on cholesterol,” said Sybille Webster, Stephanie’s mother, joining Christopher and Zarah at the buffet. “Speaking of blood, I understand you and Paul passed your consanguinity tests with flying colors.”
“Yes,” Zarah sald, opening her eyes a little wider in amusement as she listened. “A perfect match.”
“Congratulations. I told Stephanie I didn’t see how there could be any doubt about it. I knew your mother and you’d be lucky to look like her, but you don’t. I’ve never seen two people who looked or acted more alike than you and your father.”
Sybille was the first to call Christopher “your father” in speaking of him to Zarah.
“Thank you,” Zarah said.
“Don’t thank me,” Sybille said, mistaking her meaning. “Thank your genes. Stephanie gets annoyed when I say so because it contradicts the intellectual fashion, but I’ve never believed in this nurture over nature nonsense. You can’t turn a plow horse into a thoroughbred by buying it educational toys and reading it Dr. Seuss books. You’re born as you always will be, a version of your ancestors. That’s why I never gave up hope where Stephanie was concerned. Her father thought she might join the PLO, but I knew she’d be all right as soon as she found a husband, though I must say. I never dreamed it would be Paul Christopher.”
“The PLO?” Zarah sald.
“Yes. She went through a revolutionary phase just before she married your father. It was a mystery to me. Yasir Arafat is such a grotesque little gnome, with those whiskers and that checkered napkin on his head and that toy pistol sitting on his Santa Claus tummy. Of course, so is Menachem Begin on the other side; he started out as a mad bomber too, you know. One evening at somebody’s house we met a man from the Smithsonian who told us about this forensic archeologist—that was the term, isn’t it wonderful?—who could examine ancient human bones and tell you exactly what the person had looked like in life. All he needed was the skull and a leg bone or two and maybe a clavicle and he could make paintings of people who had been dead for hundreds of years. Imagine having a picture of Cleopatra or William Shakespeare. The Russians had just shot the pope in St. Peter’s Square, so I said, ‘Why don’t you get the Vatican to let your man have a look at Saint Peter’s bones? I’ll bet he’d turn out to look like a combination of Arafat and Begin.’ He said, ‘No, he’d probably look like a centaur because there are horse and donkey bones mixed in with the saint’s.’ Can you imagine?”
Christopher asked Zarah what kind of wine she wanted.
“White, please,” Zarah said.
“Ah, you drink wine,” Sybille said. “I gather you’re not a Moslem.”
“No.”
“Cathy didn’t convert in all those years? Not that she was exactly born to wear the veil with that glorious face of hers.”
“She did wear it sometimes. She liked it, in fact.”
“She liked it? Honestly? Do you?
“Yes; lots of women my age do. But my mother wasn’t much interested in religion.”
“Great beauties seldom are. I liked your mother. She played the piano very nicely. She wore the most wonderful clothes; I never saw shoes to compare to the ones she wore, they were absolutely perfect. I was very sorry to hear that she had passed away at such a young age. May I ask what happened to her?”
Christopher handed Zarah a glass of chardonnay; Sybille had not touched alcohol for years.
“Mrs. Webster was just asking me exactly what happened to my mother,” Zarah said. Then she turned to Sybille and said, “She was shot to death by terrorists.”
Sybille gasped. Arab terrorists?”
“Among others.”
“Oh, dear.” Sybille put a hand on Zarah’s arm. “Zarah, my child, I’m so sorry I made jokes about the PLO.” Stephanie, seated beside the O. G., was watching them intently. “Here,” Sybille said, handing Zarah the plate she had filled for herself. “Take this to the O. G.; I’ll make myself another. There he is, with his napkin tucked into his vest. He’s dying to talk to you; he knew your grandparents.”
Sybille rushed out of the room with a clatter of high heels; Stephanie took in the scene with a glance, rose from her place, and followed her. Zarah put down her glass of wine and carried both plates to the table; the O. G. accepted his with a little bow.
“Salmon,” he said. “The Washington standby. Did you know that it was against the law to feed indentured servants salmon more than twice a week in the Massachusetts Bay Colony? The rivers teemed with it.”
“Would you rather have something else?”
“No; I like the stuff. I don’t get as much of it as I did before my indenture expired. Sit beside me.”
Christopher intervened, taking Zarah by the arm. “I’ll bring her back in a moment,” he said.
Outside in the garden, they sat down on a bench.
“I’m sorry,” Christopher said.
Zarah was dry-eyed. “About what?” she asked. “Because my mother was shot full of holes by idiots or because I upset that foolish woman?”
“Sybille means no harm.”
He laid his hand on her cheek; she remained as she had been, with her head lifted and her hands clasped in her lap. Over the mumbling of the party inside they heard the sound of high heels on stone. It was Stephanie, emerging from the house. She reached them in half a dozen strides.
“Zarah, I apologize for Mother. She had no idea what she was getting into.”
“Thank you. There’s no need to apologize. She asked an obvious question.”
“A little too obvious. It’s her style. She didn’t mean to hurt you.”
“I know that. It was a social occasion. I should have lied.”
Stephanie sat down beside her and looked into her face for a long moment. Her manner was professional. “Do you want to talk about it?”
Zarah returned her gaze. “Not especially. Did you know my mother?”
“Not really. Whatever Mother may have said, none of us really knew Cathy; she came and went so quickly. I saw quite a lot of her in Paris when I was a child. She was always nice to me. We talked about horses. Once or twice she took me riding with her in the Bois de Boulogne; she rode like a dream.”
“That sounds like Mother,” Zarah said. She stood up, as if freeing herself of a restraining hand. “I think we should get back to the others.”
“Not yet,” Christopher said. “Tell us what happened.”
Stephanie stood up, too. “Would you rather talk to your father alone?” she asked.
“No, stay,” Zarah said. “Actually horses had something to do with what happened. We used to go on an ostrich chase every year. Mother loved it; she made everyone else go whether they wanted to or not. Ostriches run much faster than a horse, you know. The idea was to post a rider every mile or so, then get one started and chase it in relays.”
Stephanie said, “It sounds cruel.”
Zarah paused for a moment before replying. “It’s not,” she said. “It may have been in the old days, when they killed the animal for its plumes and its body fat—lots of Berbers and Arabs still believe that ostrich grease is a cure for practically everything. But all we did was run them, sometimes for fifty or sixty miles; it could go on for days with no harm to the bird. Distance means nothing to an ostrich.”
In order to find ostriches, Cathy and Zarah and a party of about thirty Ja’wabi, almost evenly divided among mature people and the young, had caravaned several hundred miles through the Sahara and made camp in the Oën oasis. There they waited for a thunderstorm to appear in the distance, and rode toward it; ostriches instinctively run straight for lightning as soon as they see it, so as to graze on the green shoots produced by a cloudburst and the powerful sunshine that follows it. Soon after dawn a couple of days later Zarah and two other young people, riding in advance of the main party, sighted a troop of more than two dozen ostriches grazing on a low hilltop. A line of riders was established in the direction of the oasis. One large male ostrich was cut out of the troop, and the chase commenced. It began at noon because even ostriches are slowed down by the heat of the midday sun.
“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?”
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.”
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.”
“Everyone says that. Why did she think he was a genius?”
“Because he was; if you’ve read his books you know that. You have to understand that he thought the Experiment was the cause of what happened to Lori, that he was responsible.”
“Responsible? How?”
Evening shadows filled the room. In the flickering light from the fireplace the O. G. suddenly looked very tired. “Not now,” he said.
“ ‘Not now’?” Zarah said. “How can you stop the story after making a statement like that?”
The O. G. lost his smile; he pointed a gnarled index finger at her chest; it was the color of a candle stub. “I can stop any time I want to, young lady,” he said testily. “I’ve gone too far as it is.”
Zarah’s large eyes, fixed expectantly on the O. G., did not waver. Just then a log fell in the andirons with a shower of sparks, and behind the O. G.’s head this sputtering image was multiplied in the rain-streaked diamond panes of a bow window.
“ ‘Gone too far’?” Zarah said. “What do you mean by that?”
“You’re a very good listener,” the O. G. replied, “and I’ve let myself be carried away. You’ve come here in the shape of another being. Half the time I think I’m talking to your grandmother, telling you things you already know.”
“Then what’s the objection?”
“You’re not Lori. You’re the Lorelei, mesmerizing me into telling you things you have no need to know.”
“No need to know? Nobody has ever had such a need to know as I do. Why won’t you tell me the rest?”
“What makes you think I know the rest?”
“You’re supposed to know everything.”
“Am I? Who says so?”
“Everyone.”
“Well, Everyone is wrong; Everyone almost always is. Remember that. I don’t know everything, and what I do know I only know up to a point. I left Berlin before the play was over, remember. There was supposed to be a different ending. Then your father came back and upset the applecart.”
“If Meryem has told you what she knows, you know more than I do.”
“All I know is what I overheard her telling Barney, years ago.”
The O. G. rose to his feet with a muffled groan, dismissing Zarah. “Did she mention a fellow named Dickie Shaw-Condon?” he asked, peering benevolently through the dusk at her. Zarah shook her head. “No?” he said. “Then you didn’t overhear everything. Has Meryem or anybody told you about the last time Paul saw his mother?”
Zarah said, “No.”
“Paul knew he was seeing her for the last time, that he was leaving her to her fate,” the O. G. said. “She wouldn’t let him cry, and she didn’t cry herself. Her last words to him were, ‘Control your face. They mustn’t make you feel anything. No goodbyes.’ Paul was fifteen years old. He never got over it. Not to this day.”
CHRISTOPHER AND ZARAH MET THE NEXT MORNING UNDER THE MARBLE dome of the National Gallery of Art. Zarah entered through the door that faced the Mall, stepping through its little rectangle of light into the rotunda. She took off her sunglasses, and as she accustomed her eyes to the churchly dimness of the place, she looked around her, taking in the rotunda’s enormous scale, its variety of stone and marble and granite, its central fountain surmounted by a bronze Mercury. She was precisely on time as usual. He was standing to her right, within the circle of mottled marble columns that support the dome, and she did not see him at once. She turned her head slowly from left to right, searching for him among the tourists in their bright vacation clothes, and when she caught sight of him a joyous expression of love rose to her face as if released from her very heart. In response Christopher’s chest filled up with the same emotion, and he smiled at her across the vast, noisy, crowded space.
Zarah came toward him through the crowd, but she did not return the smile. After greeting Christopher she stood somewhat farther away from him than usual; her face, usually so calm and alert, was drawn and anxious. As they walked across the rotunda together, he began to tell her about a certan portrait by Ingres that had always reminded him of Meryem. “I thought we’d look at that first, then at a Gainsborough that looks something like your mother at your age,” he said. “I wonder if you’ll see the resemblance, too. Probably not. I’ve reached the age where everyone reminds me of somebody else.”
He turned his head, meaning to say something else, but she interrupted him, something she had never done before.
“Can we sit down someplace?”she asked.
“Of course.”
Christopher led her down the long nave of the museum to the garden court at the east end of the building. It was quieter in this space. The tinkling of another, smaller fountain accentuated the stillness. They sat down side by side in garden chairs.
Zarah took his hand. Once again this was something she had never done before. “I’ve been talking to the O. G.”
Christopher, a little surprised by this abrupt change of subject, waited for her to go on.
“I like him,” Zarah said.
“Most people do. Watch out he doesn’t activate you.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because that’s what he’s been doing to people all his life. He can’t break himself of the habit.”
“All he seems to want to talk about is my Christopher grandparents. Lori especially.”
Christopher waited again. He was like a priest in a novel by a convert, Zarah thought, relying on the power of one sin to remind the person in the confessional of another.
“He told me parts of the story I hadn’t heard before.” Knowing that Christopher, in his reluctance to interrogate, would not ask her to go on, she continued anyway, telling him everything she had overheard during Wolkowicz’s visit to Tifawt, and everything the O. G. had told her.
“The O. G. mentioned a name—Dickie Shaw-Condon,” she said, finally. “Do you know anyone by that name?”
“Yes,” Christopher said. “He’s an Englishman. He was a friend of my father’s; he helped me out once. He must be very old now, if he’s alive.”
“I hope he is alive,” Zarah said, “because the O. G. said you couldn’t know the whole story about your mother unless you knew what this man knows.”
“Yes. He wouldn’t say any more himself.”
Christopher let go of her hand. It was an absent gesture; his thoughts were elsewhere. Where? Remembering what? Zarah did not ask. The two of them lapsed into a lengthy silence. The garden court, so called because ferns and other greenery grew in flower beds set into the marble floor, was a pleasant place to be; the fountain created the illusion that the dank refrigerated air was cooled by water running over stone instead of chemicals and machines. Zarah closed her eyes. Like her father, she was subject to rapid chains of thought that carried her in an instant through many years, many memories, and more than one language. In rapid succession she remembered everything that Lla Kahina and Wolkowicz and, only yesterday, the O. G., had told her about her grandmother.
“There are other things I haven’t told you,” Zarah said.
She opened her eyes. Christopher was looking at her; apparently he had been doing so for some time.
“You’ve told me enough for now,” he said. “I think that you and I had better go and see Meryem.”
STEPHANIE HAD A GROUP THERAPY SESSION THAT EVENING, AND AS soon as she came home she changed costumes and ran for two miles to relieve the stress that this induced. Consequently Christopher had no opportunity to describe his meeting with Zarah until Stephanie finished her shower and got into bed with him.
He had intended to leave any mention of the new clues to his mother’s fate until last, but Stephanie interrupted before he got to that part of the story. “Are you telling me,” she said, “that you’re going to just take off for the Sahara Desert alone with that young woman?”
“Unless you want to join us,” Christopher replied.
Stephanie snorted disdainfully. “You know perfectly well I can’t leave my patients. Every hour of every working day is booked from now until February.”
As a result of her long run in the emissions-saturated air of Georgetown and the sudden emotion that showed so plainly in her face, Stephanie’s throat was dry. She had drunk all the water in the glass on her bedside table; she drank twelve eight-ounce glasses of water every day. Christopher offered her his own untouched glass of spring water, transported in plastic containers from an underground source in Maine. She waved it away and continued to clear her throat; there were tears in her eyes.
“Besides,” she said, “What are we supposed to do about Lori?”
“She can go, too. She’d love it.”
“She might, if she wasn’t taken hostage by the people who shot Cathy. We can’t just take her out of school for a month.”
“It wouldn’t be for a whole month. Anyway, what if it was? What would she miss?”
“A lot. She’s in an intensive fast-track curriculum. She’d never catch up. Not everybody is as free as a bird to come and go as they please, you know. Some people in this society, even little girls who want to get into a good college, lead ordinary, regular lives according to a schedule and their obligations.”
Coughing into her fist, Stephanie turned her eyes away, embarrassed that she had let these unkind words slip out. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
This was not the first time such a thing had happened. Stephanie insisted on paying exactly half of their household expenses, exclusive of wine and spirits, of which she did not approve; and books, on which Christopher spent far more than the whole family spent on food; and their child’s tuition at a progressive private school, to which she could not afford to contribute and still buy all her own clothes. Although Stephanie insisted, as a matter of political conviction, that both partners in a marriage should have equal rights and responsibilities, another part of her nature caused her to resent the fact that she, the wife, went to work every day while Christopher, the husband, stayed at home. She knew that this was irrational, but there seemed to be nothing she could do about the anger it aroused in her. She understood, on the intellectual level, that this situation was not Christopher’s fault. He was unemployable, even by the Outfit; fortunately, he had no need to earn a living. The Outfit paid him the modest pension that had accrued during his years of hazardous service under deep cover, but his main income came from elsewhere. Sebastian Laux, as the executor of Hubbard Christopher’s will, had turned an estate of $78,000 into more than $1.5 million over a period of thirty years, including the decade that Christopher spent in jail. This capital sum, invested by the Bank in tax-free bonds and U. S. Treasury notes, yielded more money than Christopher needed to live on. Thanks to Sebastian, who had bought it in his absence as an investment for the estate, he owned the house they lived in outright. He was not idle, in fact he worked hard—harder, perhaps, than Stephanie, who did little but listen to her patients all day and give them standardized advice according to the category of personality disorder into which they fell; she accepted no dangerous lunatics for treatment, only educated middle class people who did not understand why they were less happy and less successful than they deserved to be. Like his father before him, on the other hand, Christopher rose early every morning and wrote for several hours. Unlike Hubbard, however, he did not publish what he wrote. He delivered his manuscripts, instead, to D. & D. Laux & Co. for safekeeping; as his literary executor, Stephanie would have the right to publish, or not publish, what he had written after his death.
“I’m sorry,” Stephanie said again. “I had no right to accuse you of being one of the idle rich.” Christopher smiled gently, a humorous light in his glance. “Don’t condescend,” she said.
“All right,” Christopher replied. “But getting back to Lori, ten seems a little young to be chained to a desk in the Ministry of Good Works.”
“Please don’t use Lori as a diversion. I want to discuss the real problem here, which is Zarah. It’s only been two weeks since she showed up, and everything has changed.”
“Stephanie, stop. Nothing has changed except that she’s taken her rightful place in the family. You say yourself that this wouldn’t be a factor if she were a male. She can’t help it if she’s a female; she can’t help it if she happens to resemble certain members of her own family.”
“Gender and resemblance are not the point. It’s not her looks that bother me, although God knows she’s every woman’s nightmare. It’s the way you look at her, as though a lover has come back to you from the grave. What are you remembering when she walks in?”
Christopher let several moments pass before he answered. Stephanie, who believed so strongly in the honest answer, and would settle for nothing less, did not always react to such answers happily. “Obviously she reminds me of my mother,” he said at last. “But your intuition, if that’s what it is, is correct—there’s more to it than that. She’s a lot like Molly. I don’t know how that can be, there’s no rhyme or reason to it. But it’s true.”
Stephanie gasped. “She’s like Molly? She reminds you of Molly? How can you say such a thing to me?”
They had never in all the years of their marriage mentioned Molly’s name. Everyone who remembered her, Stephanie’s mother and father in particular, said that she was the woman Christopher had really loved. Christopher himself had never denied this. While in prison he had written an immensely long poem, filled with tenderness and lust and the deep amusement that always accompanies true love, that could only be about Molly. His enemies had killed her as a means of punishing Christopher, but he did not know this until the Chinese let him go. Stephanie had been waiting for him. She had married him, healed him, and borne his child, and now, after all these years and all that had happened between them, he thought that Molly had come back from the dead as his own flesh and blood, made young and beautiful again.
“That was really heartless,” Stephanie said. “Go to Africa and be damned!”
She leaped out of bed, tumbling her unread biography of Castro onto the floor. Snatching up her pillow, she wrapped the light blanket from the foot of the bed around her naked body, as though she had just discovered that Christopher was not her husband, but someone who had been posing as her husband and had betrayed himself by falling disastrously out of character in the middle of the act of love. All this happened rapidly—Stephanie, lithe and mentally alert owing to her daily regimen of exercise and diet—was very quick in her movements, though a little clumsy. She knocked over the reading lamp as she ran out of the room, leaving Christopher by himself in the darkened room.
He fixed the lamp, then put on a robe and followed her downstairs. Still wrapped in her blanket, she was seated on a sofa in the long room. No lamps burned. He sat down beside her. In the faint wash of the streetlight coming through the front window she looked tousled and very young; Stephanie was a small woman, and in certain lights, while wearing certain clothes, and especially when she had been crying, she might have been mistaken for a schoolgirl. He touched her wet cheek. She turned her head away.
“I’m sorry to be behaving like this,” she said. “But this situation is very threatening. I’ve spent our whole marriage trying to persuade you to put the past behind you and live in the present, and now this person shows up and all you want to do is go back with her to wherever she comes from. You can’t change anything by going back, Paul.”
“I don’t imagine that I can, but at least I’ll know the truth.”
“Fuck the truth. On second thought, don’t. I’ll never get you back if you do.”
“That’s not very funny.”
“Not if the DNA test didn’t lie, it isn’t.”
She wouldn’t meet his eyes. “Stephanie,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better for everybody concerned if you stopped imagining that I’m going to fall in love with my own daughter?”
“I’m not the one who’s imagining things. It would be better for you if you acknowledged your own fantasies.”
They quarreled rarely; Christopher disliked it. He was seldom impatient with her, even more seldom outspoken because the consequences were so exhausting, but now he raised his voice.
“That’s a lot of psychobabble bullshit, Stephanie,” he said. “I don’t fantasize about Zarah; the reality is enough. If even that is too much for you, then we’ll find a way to work it out, but not at the expense of losing her again. I can’t help the memories I have. I collected them before you came into the picture. I’m an old man.”
“Like hell you are.”
He paid no attention. “You have no rivals. Cathy is dead, Molly is dead. I loved Zarah at first sight because I recognized her as my child, and understood the feeling that gave me because I felt the same way the first time I saw Lori. But that’s all there is to it. I can’t hide my feelings to save your feelings. If I were your patient instead of your husband you’d call that healthy and wise.”
“You’re not my patient.”
“No, but you’re the one who taught me to accept my feelings. That’s what I’m doing, and I’m grateful for the gift.”
Stephanie inhaled and expelled half a dozen deep breaths; she believed in this exercise as a way to draw extra oxygen into the system and relieve emotional stress.
“All right,” she said. “Have it your way. I’ll say no more.” Her voice was still husky. She had drawn a fresh tumbler of pure water from the plastic jug in the refrigerator, and she drank from the glass.
“You can say anything you like as long as I have the right of reply,” Christopher said. “Now. Will you come to Africa with us?”
“No.”
“Will you join us in London?”
“No. I can’t just cancel people out on a whim. My patients depend on me. And you can’t take Lori along as a chaperone. It’s too dangerous. I won’t have it … Ostrich chases. Jesus!”
“Are you interested in hearing why I want to make this trip?”
“Haven’t you already told me? I assume it has to do with memories.”
“It does. But you haven’t given me a chance to tell you which ones.”
Stephanie cut him off with a gesture. “Never mind.” She stood up and gathered her blanket around her. “Don’t tell me any more,” she said. “I’ll just bore you with psychobabble if you do.”
She went upstairs, leaping up the treads for the exercise as she always did with a thudding of bare feet, and when Christopher joined her in bed a few minutes later, she pretended to be asleep.
The next morning when she woke, he was gone.