On one occasion Matisse was showing a lady a picture of his in which he had painted a naked woman, and the lady exclaimed, “But a woman isn’t like that”: to which he answered, “It isn’t a woman, madam, it’s a picture.”
—W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Points of View
Second Sight is the seventh and final volume of the long episodic novel about Paul Christopher and his family that I have been writing over the past eighteen years. Like the six earlier freestanding volumes in the series, this one is a work of fiction in which characters and their actions and the institution called “the Outfit” are imaginary. Where historical detail falling outside the mechanism of the story is concerned, however, I have, as before, tried to avoid departures from the accepted facts. Thus, although the Ja’wabi and their history are invented, the existence of tribes of Jews among the Berbers before the Arab conquest and the legend of Joab’s pursuit of the Philistines into North Africa are firmly established; Punic, the language spoken and written in Carthage and elsewhere in the far Maghrib, is thought by scholars to have been similar to the Hebrew spoken in Canaan in the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age. I have devised a fate for Joab that differs from the one recorded in the Bible, but my account of his relations with King David and King Solomon is meant to be consistent with 2 Samuel and 1 Kings. Kahina, the seer-leader of the Jerawa Berbers, is a historical personage mentioned by Ibn Khaldün, among many others, and I have made no attempt to embellish her life or character. Reinhard Heydrich’s encounters with the Christophers and Meryem are notional, but his personality, habits, physical appearance, and real-life crimes are taken from the archives. Patchen’s quotations regarding the Wandervögel and the Hitler Youth are from the actual books cited. I have mined the works of writers from the authors of Genesis onward for details to support my story, but I owe a particular debt to General Melchior Joseph Eugène Daumas’s wonderful account of nomad life in the French Maghrib in the nineteenth century, Les chevaux du Sahara et les moeurs du désert, from which I have borrowed Meryem’s name, the poem on 177, and more than a little of the desert lore attributed to the Ja’wabi. Scriptural quotations are from The New Jerusalem Bible and (usually) from Arthur J. Arberry’s translation of the Koran. Martha Patchen’s Indians have their origins in a story told to me more than thirty years ago by Alfonso Crespo of La Paz, Bolivia. Aamir Ali, who has climbed many of the peaks in the main range of the Alps, refreshed my memory as to their nomenclature. Bruce M. Cowan, M. D., provided advice on medical matters, as he has done with previous volumes, but it should be mentioned that I disregarded Dr. Cowan’s warning of mortal consequences when I permitted Patchen to inject himself with an amphetamine as an antidote to Versed. Professor Tran Van Dinh reviewed the sections dealing with Vietnamese culture and mythology; references to the latter owe much to the admirable Village in Vietnam by Gerald Cannon Hickey. Marjorie E. Rynas searched many libraries for source material and Nancy Stanford McCarry checked the manuscript for accuracy. Any remaining errors are the result of my own carelessness or the requirements of the plot.
—C. McC.