Second sight, p.4
Second Sight, page 4
“For the record,” Maria said, “I don’t believe a word of that tale about falling off the motorbike.”
“Is that why we’re out here?” Cathy said. “To talk about what you don’t believe?”
She turned to go, but Maria darted around her and spread her arms, blocking the path. “Wait,” she said. “I want to tell you what Paul did to Otto and me.”
The story Maria then told was so complicated that Cathy could scarcely follow it. A man in Russia, somebody Otto had known years before, had written a great novel. Otto and Maria had smuggled it out of Russia somehow, and one of the agents in the chain of couriers had been killed just after he handed the manuscript over to Christopher in Berlin.
“It was that, seeing a man die, actually die, that set Paul off,” Maria said. “He has this American idea that things like that should never happen, that everybody, even the opposition, is made up of nice boys who went to Yale and Harvard and wouldn’t hurt a fly.”
“I thought Paul had seen plenty of people die.”
“Really?” she said. “When did he see that?”
“In the war,” Cathy replied. “He has bullet wounds all over his body.”
“Oh, the war. That’s something else altogether.”
“Excuse me,” Cathy said. “I didn’t know that World War Two wasn’t the real thing.”
Maria went on as if Cathy had never interrupted her: Paul had not wanted to publish the book. Otto had insisted.
“Why did they disagree?” Cathy asked.
“Because it became obvious that publication might mean the end of the author.”
“The end of him? You mean the Russians would have killed him?”
“Yes. Of course they would have killed him. But the author was prepared for that. It was Paul who objected to paying the necessary price.”
“The necessary price? Who decides what that is?”
“Not Paul,” Maria said. “It was none of Paul’s business what this man did with his life. He was a great writer. He had been silent, imprisoned in the labor camps, for thirty years. This was his greatest work—in this novel he had captured Russia itself, Otto said. He sent it to Otto because Otto was the one person in the world he could trust to have the guts to get it into print no matter what. What did he care about death?”
“You mean Russians like to die?”
A smile of pleasure spread over Maria’s wet face. “Paul should have talked to you,” she said. “He might have understood things better if he had. The answer is yes, in certain circumstances, when there is no other way to assert one’s humanity—yes, then they love death better than the alternative. That’s exactly the point, the point that Paul could never understand.”
“Oh, Maria,” Cathy said, “what bullshit. You mean Paul found out you killed this man and turned you in.”
Maria lifted her hands, fingers curved, then let them fall. “That’s right, Cathy,” she said. “Paul cracked the case—no one is better at that than Paul, as you have reason to know. He found out every thing. And understood nothing.”
Cathy shivered and shifted from foot to foot. “Are we close to the end of all this?” she asked. “I can’t stay out here much longer.”
“Paul made a case against us that Headquarters believed,” Maria said. “They decided we were working for the other side, that Otto—Otto!—was working for the other side. Paul hounded us out of the Outfit. He turned everything Otto had ever done—done for Paul’s precious America—to shit. So here we are, with no money, no pension, no honor.”
“No wonder you were so glad to see me,” Cathy said.
“That was before I knew about your souvenir,” Maria said. “This is Paul’s baby you’re carrying?”
“Yes.”
“There’s no doubt about it?”
“None.”
“Then for God’s sake, Cathy, use your head for once,” Maria said. “Get rid of it. Tomorrow. Don’t bring another coldhearted bastard like its father into the world.”
9
WHEN SHE GOT BACK TO THE HOUSE, CATHY WENT STRAIGHT TO BED. When she woke up Lla Kahina was playing cards by candlelight. It was four o’clock in the morning.
“You’ve been dreaming,” Lla Kahina said.
“What about, do you know? I can never remember.”
“It’s not in the cards. You’ve been turning and talking.”
“What is in the cards? Do you always play this way, day and night?”
“No. Something is trying to come through, but it can’t. Some thing in this house is blocking it.”
“That’s a relief,” Cathy said. “Everybody else in Switzerland wants to tell me something I don’t want to hear.”
Because the candle was between them, it shone on Lla Kahina’s face, revealing it in a new way.
“I don’t know why, Lla Kahina,” Cathy said, “but I think I know you. I recognize you.”
“Do you? That happens sometimes.”
Cathy frowned, trying to remember. Lla Kahina was calm, patient. She waited for Cathy to speak again.
“I think I’ll go to Paris tomorrow,” Cathy said. “Do you want to come with me?”
She did not know why she asked the question. Lla Kahina was not in the least surprised by it.
“Of course,” she said. “But we must take the train. No air planes. You must not lose contact with the earth.”
“That’s fine with me,” Cathy said.
TWO
1
CATHY SAW CHRISTOPHER FROM A LONG WAY OFF. HE WAS SITTING ON a bench in the Bois de Boulogne with his friend David Patchen. Cathy was cantering a borrowed chestnut mare along the bridle path near the Grande Cascade. He was looking straight at her. She slowed the mare to a trot, then to a walk, as she approached the bench.
Christopher stood up. Patchen rose, too, and turned around. He wore a black patch over one of his eyes. As soon as he saw Cathy, he limped away into the trees.
“You’re riding again,” Christopher said.
“Yes, almost every day. I’m all right again. Good genes.”
This was a joke from the past. On. being told that his daughter had married Christopher, her father had taken his new son-in-law aside and said, “You’ll never have to worry about her health. The Kirkpatricks are never sick—good genes.”
“Are you really all right?” Christopher said.
Cathy did not answer his question. “What about you?” she said.
“This is kind of a cold morning to be sitting on a park bench.” “I guess so,” Christopher said. “David likes to be outdoors.” “I remember.”
Patchen was the man Christopher reported to in the Outfit. He came over to Paris five or six times a year, and Christopher went to Washington five or six times. The two of them walked all over both cities together, talking and talking, out of the reach of microphones.
“Where are you living?” Christopher asked.
“At my parents’ place. For now. They won’t be back until spring.” Cathy’s mother and father came to Paris twice a year for the racing seasons at Auteuil and Longchamps.
“I saw your father in the bar of the Jockey Club just after you left Rome,” Christopher said. “He asked about you. He invited me to dinner. He didn’t seem to know what’s happened to you and me.”
“Who does? What did you say?”
“I said I hadn’t seen you for a while. You haven’t told them?”
Cathy shook her head. The mare fidgeted. Cathy’s legs trembled slightly from the strain of keeping her under control; she was not really strong enough to ride yet. She felt dizzy, nauseated, feverish in her turtleneck sweater, her tweed jacket, her gloves. Would Christopher, who missed nothing, notice her condition? The baby showed very little, and she was wearing one of her mother’s jackets that was a size or two too large for her.
Once again, frowning anxiously, Christopher said, “Are you all right?”
“Fine. My friend, here, doesn’t want to stand still. And to tell the truth, I’m a little shaky, seeing you like this, all of a sudden.”
“You too?”
Christopher took off his glove and held out his left hand. It trembled, something she had never seen before. He no longer wore his wedding band, but the impression it had made in the flesh of his finger was still clearly visible.
Christopher’s presence silenced her. She had always been afraid, from the day she met him, that she was not smart enough for him, that she would say something that would drive him away from her. She made jokes for other men, but never for Christopher.
“It’s hell, not knowing what to say like this,” Cathy said. “Do you want to stick to the weather, or what?”
“We can talk about anything you want.”
“Why don’t you start?”
“I don’t know what’s left to say.”
Cathy nodded, biting her lower lip again. “I was surprised when you cried that day,” she said.
He had wept at the airport, saying goodbye to her.
“Before,” Cathy said, “I was always the one who cried. I don’t do that much anymore. I’ve seen the light.”
Christopher reached out as if to touch her, remembered himself, and let his hand drop to his side.
“Oh, shit, Paul,” she said. “What did I think I was doing?”
“I don’t know, Cathy,” he said.
She kicked the mare into a gallop and rode away. Bastard, she thought. Bastard for not loving me enough to kill me for what I did to you.
2
WHEN CATHY CAME BACK FROM THE BOIS DE BOULOGNE SHE WENT straight to her room, locked the door, and took a hot bath. During their marriage, because of Christopher’s absences, she had fallen into the habit of talking to him when he was not there.
“God,” she said to his invisible presence now, “how I wish I hadn’t seen you today. How I wish that none of this had ever happened.”
When they were married and he was always away, she used to imagine his return, imagine love in his glance, imagine the words he would speak; imagine his passion. In this make-believe homecoming, it was Christopher who longed for Cathy, Christopher who was half-mad with loneliness, Christopher who wept as they made love. The greatest surprise of her life was her love for him; she truly had not known that a woman could love a man more than he loved her. Nothing in her previous life, in which she had always been more beautiful than anyone else, always been the object of desire, had prepared her for this. She had supposed that the gift of her body would bring her, in return, absolute power over his heart. But had Christopher ever loved her? Had he always known, as Lla Kahina had told her, that the woman he would really love was waiting for him in the future? Who was this evil stranger? How could she be more beautiful than Cathy? What did she have that he wanted so desperately? He had never wanted anything when he was with Cathy; he had merely acquiesced in what she wanted. At the time she had mistaken that for love, but now she knew it for what it was —politesse, courtesy and consideration in which the heart played no part.
“All right, I understand,” she said. “You’re all through with politeness, Paul; it’s time for love. I hope you find it.”
For all Cathy knew, he had found it already. Why shouldn’t he? Hadn’t he earned it by living with her in a state of chivalry when what he really wanted was to love somebody more than she loved him? Cathy punched the water hard; a cupful flew across the room and splashed against the full-length mirror in which she had been watching herself.
“I hope the bitch dies on you,” she said to the absent Christopher. She did not cry. “I’m all through crying,” she said. “That’s over. Lots of things are over.”
She put on robe and slippers and went to the library. Lla Kahina was already having tea. Tea was her favorite meal; she often slept through lunch, the principal meal of the day, and consumed only liquids for dinner.
“Why?” Cathy had asked.
“I’ve never liked French food. My husband didn’t like it either. He always ordered the same things in restaurants—oysters, clear soup, roast lamb, berries; things that didn’t come in disguise.”
“Is that what he called sauces? Disguises?”
“No. Paul’s father called them that, in one of his novels. It was called The Masked Ball. It was all about people making themselves important.”
“Are you in it?”
“Not in that one. He wrote it before we met.”
Lla Kahina said no more on this subject. She said little about herself, and most of what Cathy knew about her she knew from Otto’s stories or from her own observation. Lla Kahina seemed to have plenty of money; Cathy had seen her handing Maria Rothchild a huge wad of francs before they left Switzerland, and she was always telephoning shops for food and flowers for the apartment and for books for herself. She herself never went outside. She neither wrote nor received letters. She did not read the newspapers. She liked to listen in another room while Cathy played the piano. She seemed to practice no religion. This surprised Cathy; she had supposed that Moslems did their ablutions and prayed with their faces toward Mecca five times a day no matter where they found themselves. When Cathy asked questions, Lla Kahina answered them: she was separated from her husband, she had no children of her own, she came from a place in North Africa called the Idáren Dráren.
“Idáren Dráren,” Cathy said. “That’s beautiful. What does it mean in Berber?”
“The Mountains of Mountains.”
“Is it beautiful there?”
“You will think so when you see it.”
“I’m going to see it?”
“Oh, yes.”
“The cards say so?”
“Yes.”
Lla Kahina laid the deck on the table; Cathy cut and shuffled.
“Good, that’s settled. What else do they say?”
“You saw your husband today,” she said. “He was sitting on a bench with a man dressed in black. You ran your horse very fast afterward.”
“You see all that in the six of hearts?”
“I saw some of it before.”
“When?”
“In Switzerland.”
“Why didn’t you tell me before?”
“It wasn’t clear in Switzerlad. In any case, what happened would still have happened.”
“Then when is our next star-crossed meeting?”
All the cards had been turned over. Lla Kahina handed Cathy the deck to be shuffled. “He’s gone forever,” she said.
“Gone? You mean I’ll never see him again?”
“Once more, perhaps. It isn’t clear.”
“How do you know? You’re not even looking at the cards.” “No, but it was the first thing I ever saw about you, and I see it all the time; you know that.”
“Then tell me something that I don’t know; something nice.”
Lla Kahina took back the shuffled deck and laid out three cards, then three more as if to check the result.
“There is a second child,” she said.
Cathy thought immediately, with furious jealousy, of the woman in Christopher’s future. Or were they together already? Had they already made love? The thought was unbearable.
“You mean somebody else is pregnant by Paul?”
“No. You’re carrying twins.”
Cathy swept the cards off the table. “I don’t believe it,” she said. “Enough is enough.”
But when she went to the American Hospital for her next regular checkup, the doctor listened at her abdomen with a stethoscope for a long time, frowning in concentration. Finally he looked up and grinned.
“You know,” he said, “I think Junior has company.”
“What?”
“I get two heartbeats. Listen.”
He handed her the instrument and held the bell in the right place. Cathy heard her own heart, and then a sound like that made by a stopwatch wrapped in a handkerchief.
“Hear it?” The doctor moved the bell downward; she heard the muffled ticking of a second stopwatch. “Hear that, honey? That’s the other twin.”
After that, Cathy had no doubts at all about Lla Kahina’s power to know what was going to happen to her. But why was it happening? Why couldn’t she just be happy?
3
FOR THE TWINS’ SAKE, CATHY LIVED BY THE CLOCK. SHE WOKE UP AT eight, ate her breakfast at eight-thirty, and rode in the Bois de Boulogne from nine till ten-thirty. She was home by eleven, and bathed and dressed again by twelve. She read the inside pages of the Herald-Tribune until lunch at one o’clock, took an hour’s nap, and spent two hours at the piano. In the late afternoon she went for a long walk, usually along the Seine. She wore her Loden cape with the hood up, so that she was as unrecognizable as a nun as she strode along the embankment beneath the bridges and up and down the steep stone stairs that connected the river and the streets.
In a used book stall on the Quai Voltaire, she found a battered portfolio containing Beethoven’s last quartets, scored for the piano, and bought it for fifty francs. This music was beyond her ability as a pianist, but she decided to try to learn it anyway, as an aid to her program of forgetting. As she played, sight-reading from the yellowed pages of the score, she never knew what to expect. Tempo and tone shifted, the mood swung, texture changed without warning. The works were five long cries of abandonment and loneliness. They suited her mood.
This immensely complicated music did for Cathy what she had wanted it to do. It made it impossible to remember anything else. The effort of playing left her groggy and detached from her surroundings. Sometimes she would walk all the way to the Pont de la Concorde before her mind began to work normally again.
One afternoon in December, as she rose exhausted from the piano, she heard the telephone ringing. When she picked up the instrument an English-speaking male voice that she had heard before, but did not immediately recognize, said, “I’m trying to reach Catherine.”
No one except teachers had ever called her Catherine. Cathy responded in French. “Who’s calling?”
“A friend from college.”
These words, delivered in a dry-throated, distant tone, brought her back to reality with a rush of anxiety. This was the recognition phrase that Christopher had set up so that she would know, if someone phoned while he was in the field, that the caller was a member of the Outfit with a message from him or news of him. She changed to English and gave the answering phrase.
