Second sight, p.41
Second Sight, page 41
“In the song?”
Zarah unveiled her face and grinned with unconcealed amusement. “No,” she said. “In real life.”
Three nights later they arrived on the slope of Tinzár. “The highest place in the world,” Zarah said, smiling. Leading him among the rocks, she showed him the place where the birthing tent had been pitched, then pulled up the sleeve of her blouse to show him the red thread tied around her wrist.
“Kbira tied this on me this morning,” she said. “She always does when we come to Tinzár.”
“She knows the story?”
“Everyone does. You mustn’t laugh or think that I’m making this up. The Ja’wabi really think that Mother and I and my twin were the same people as the ones in Genesis, born into another age. According to the way they look at the world, things happen over and over again, with people sort of leapfrogging through history to relive their lives in different times and different places.”
“Then they must know exactly what’s going to happen to you in this life.”
“Lla Kahina knows. I don’t know about the others.” She glanced quickly at Christopher, as if to catch the slightest glint of skepticism in his eye. “Don’t,” she said, “form an opinion about what Lla Kahina knows until you’ve met her again.”
She pointed out the cairn under which her stillborn brother was buried. “Mother made me memorize the location,” she said.
“She visited this place?”
“Every year on our birthday. It nearly always snowed; we’d bring flowers and put them on the grave. Lla Kahina always cleared them away before we left to preserve the secret. It bothered Mother that the grave wasn’t marked. But if she had put up a cross as she wanted to, the poor little fellow would have been dug up and thrown over the cliff. Christians are really hated in this part of the world; worse than Jews, even.”
“Do the Ja’wabi hate them?”
“Christians? They hardly know they exist. The French were their only experience of them, apart from Mother, who didn’t count, and now she and the French have come and gone.”
“What about you?”
She slipped her arm through his and walked with him a few steps before answering. They could hear the wind howling among the red crags and the river brawling through the gorge at the bottom of the precipice. She smiled at him; since leaving America she had a beautiful smile, filled with good-hearted innocence. “I’m a different case,” she said at last.
That evening, in the last light of the day, the whole party climbed to the summit of Tinzár and slept under the shelter of a ledge that had obviously been much used by campers in the past. Tonight there was no singing or merriment or even any food; immediately on arrival the Ibal Iden crawled into sleeping bags and went to sleep.
Christopher was awakened before dawn by the smell and crackle of a huge fire. The Ibal Iden had brought the smallest of the lambs with them, carrying it over rocks that it could not negotiate on its own and tethering it outside the shelter overnight. By the time Christopher woke up it had been slaughtered and bled, but left unskinned. At the moment that the sun came up, Ja’wab, reached into the flames and laid the dismembered carcass on a platform of rocks blackened by many previous fires. The oily wool burned off in moments, sending up an acrid unmistakable stink, and then the flesh began to cook, creating a more familiar and agreeable aroma. Another man threw what looked like a ball of oiled bread dough onto the platform; it was consumed almost at once, after burning with a surprisingly strong, sweetish odor.
All this took place without conversation, much less with prayers. It was obvious, nevertheless, that the burning of the lamb was a solemn ceremony and the Ibal Iden were deeply moved by it. Ja’wab watched the flames with his arms around his wives, the other boys sat close together in a row. By the time the fire died, about three hours later, the lamb was cooked through, and the Ja’wabi ate it. They used no knives or other implements to carve it, but tore bits of it from the bone with their fingers and passed it to each other, eating it under the shelter of the rock with flat bread that the women had baked the day before.
Zarah was included in all this as an equal. So was Christopher. He was not surprised. Zarah had told him what to expect, and why, and in the small Bible that he carried among his books he had looked up the relevant passage in the Book of Numbers: “Yahweh spoke to Moses and said, ‘Whenever [offering] food burnt as a smell pleasing to Yahweh … there will be one law for you, members of the community, and the … alien alike, a law binding your descendants for ever: before Yahweh you and the alien are no different.’ ”
“Yes,” Zarah said when he showed her the passage. “That’s what the Ja’wabi say. That’s how they live.”
6
CHRISTOPHER AND ZARAH AND THE IBALIDEN ARRIVED AT TIFAWT IN darkness—the village had never been electrified—and went to bed immediately. The old woman, Aziza, who had been with them in the mountains, lighted Christopher with a candle down a gloomy corridor to his bedroom. He found it impossible to sleep. Seeing the place on Tinzár where Zarah had been born in secrecy and her twin buried in stealth had made him visualize Cathy again as she had appeared to him during their conception, battered and desperate and afraid to die. Against all odds, she had gotten what she wanted, and it seemed to him that Cathy was still present in this house where she had hidden herself and their children away for almost exactly half her lifetime—not present as a complete ghost, but lingering in some partial form, as if her poor numb heart had escaped from the ectoplasm at the last moment and stayed behind, too difficult a case even for death to cure.
When, at the crack of dawn, Christopher heard the muezzin calling the salat as-subh, he went out into the courtyard, intending to write in his notebook. A dwarfish figure crouched by the fountain and groped in the water. Because the sun was only just beginning to rise, the garden was still filled with shadows, and for an instant Christopher mistook him for a servant performing his ablutions. Then Yeho Stern stood up and spoke to him in German.
“Good morning,” he said, holding up two dripping hands for Christopher to see. “I’ve been playing with the fish; I was told that your daughter Zarah taught them to eat bread crumbs out of a human hand. It’s true. They do.” He wiped his palms on his trousers and shook hands. “Yeho Stern.”
They had never met, but Christopher knew him by reputation and recognized him even before he heard the name. He said, “You’ve been waiting for me?”
“Yes, but you’re an early riser, so not for long,” Yeho replied. “Here—this is for you.”
He handed Christopher an envelope. The letter inside, scribbled in the O. G.’s Palmer Method hand on both sides of a sheet of drugstore paper, was written in German—but in the Greek cipher. This presented certain problems with diphthongs and umlauts, but Christopher read it easily enough. It was a terse but essentially complete account of the latest developments in the Beautiful Dreamers case, omitting any reference to the Eye of Gaza. All proper names were omitted also. The last line read, “Your friend from Okinawa days needs you; the bearer will explain.”
“Are you instructed to wait for a reply?” Christopher asked.
Yeho ignored the other man’s sardonic tone of voice. “I’m here to tell you what the plan is,” he said. “Then if you want to reply, I’ll listen and pass on what you say.”
Christopher handed back the O. G.’s letter. “I don’t need to know any more,” he said, speaking English. “I’m out. Forever. Old times are gone and forgotten. Tell the O. G. that.”
“You don’t want to help David?”
“David has a cast of thousands to help him.”
“But nobody like you anymore, according to him. He thinks you’re the only one who can do the job. You and your daughter.”
Christopher had begun to turn away. He stopped. “My daughter?” he said. “What does she have to do with it?”
“A lot. There’s a connection.”
“A connection to Zarah? Like hell there is. Look around you.”
“Listen,” Yeho said.
“This is where she comes from,” Christopher said. “This is where she’s spent her life. There’s no possible connection.”
Yeho took Christopher’s arm and repeated, “Listen,” he said, “I’m trying to tell you something.” He was standing quite close now, so that the two of them could speak in very low voices. Barely moving his lips, speaking German again, he told Christopher about Hassan Abdallah. Christopher, rigid and cold in manner, but listening at last, stared down at him, eyes glittering. Yeho had seldom seen a trained agent show so much anger. He was surprised by the display. How could Christopher have been as good as everyone said he was if this was how he behaved before strangers? Well, who knew? Maybe he had changed. And if he had changed once, he could change again and go back to being the operator he used to be. Yeho described Hassan Abdallah’s obsession with the Ja’wabi.
“You understand what I’m saying to you?” he said. “This man wants to wipe out the Ja’wabi to the last fetus.”
“Including Zarah,” Christopher said. “Is that the point you’re making?”
“That’s it. She may not look like a Jew, but she thinks like a Jew, feels like a Jew, talks like a Jew, and hangs around with Jews. To this psychopath who wants to kill her, she’s a Jew.”
Christopher said, “Is that all you came here to tell me?”
“Unless it’s not enough,” Yeho replied. “Maybe you have questions.”
“Like what?”
“Like who was this Russian named Butterfly, and why was he talking to us. Does that make you wonder?”
“Not especially.”
In the strengthening light—no more than five minutes had passed— Christopher’s anger was still visible, but he was beginning to control it better. Yeho understood. This was a man who had lost almost everything, and then got some of it back, more than he ever expected. And now he was being asked to gamble it all. No wonder he looked like he might kill Yeho with his bare hands before he remembered that Yeho was not the enemy. Yeho stood his ground; Christopher was not the first man he had ever seen in this condition. Or the first he had cured of it.
“I’m going to tell you, like it or not. Butterfly was the man David gave to the Chinese to get you back. It was a very big price to pay. At the time I thought he was crazy. Why did I think so? Because I knew something like what’s now happening was bound to happen if he traded this Russian before we rolled up his networks. David knew that, too, but he did it anyway. Why? To get you, his friend, out of China. It was a stupid thing to do. They tell me you were a great operator in your day, so maybe you wouldn’t have made the same mistake if you’d been him and he had been the one in chains. But David did it, and I was the go-between because I knew how much value he placed on getting you out. Now this bad deal is coming back to haunt us, even here in this place where your daughter grew up in peace and innocence. So don’t tell me there are no connections, Paul. There are plenty of connections.”
Until this moment Christopher had known nothing about the details of his release from prison; Patchen had never mentioned the negotiations, except to tell him that he owed no debt to the Outfit. On hearing the truth he felt slightly nauseated and lightheaded; turning his back to Yeho, he took several deep breaths to draw oxygen into his lungs and bloodstream—Stephanie’s trick. Because of the altitude, it did not work too well, and when he turned around again, the same lifetime of bad memories that Yeho had detected a moment before still came and went in his eyes. Then his expression changed.
“All right,” Christopher said calmly. “But not with Zarah, and not right now. I need a few days to myself.”
“Zarah may have her own ideas about all this,” Yeho said. “But one thing at a time. Lla Kahina told me what you’re after. I wish you luck. Where I come from, your parents are remembered. One more connection.”
7
THE MYSTERIOUS GREEN EYES AND THE TATTOOED TEARS BENEATH them were the same, but otherwise little was left of the Meryem Christopher had known half a century before in Berlin. As an old woman seated in her garden in Tifawt she was paler, smaller, stiller—a bundle of dark clothes deposited in a wicker chair. The bony hand she held out to him was webbed with blue veins under its desiccated skin. When to his own surprise he kissed it (a Prussian gesture he had not made since boyhood) the hand had no more scent or taste than an object made of wax. Holding it to his lips he understood the reality: his mother, if still alive, would be as old as Lla Kahina; older. In Christopher’s memory Lori had remained as she was when he last saw her in the hands of the Gestapo, a woman of thirty-five who still looked very much like the girl of nineteen captured in Zaentz’s drawing. If Zaentz could paint these two friends together now, would he still suggest they were somehow the same woman inhabiting two bodies?
“Well,” Lla Kahina said. “Paul. At last.”
“It’s been a long time, all right,” Christopher said. “But I understand you’ve been keeping in touch.”
Affection and amusement mingled in her smile. “The same Paul,” she said. “Sit down beside me.”
They talked for three days, always in the cool of the garden. It was October now; the days were mild and bright. It snowed on the mountain peaks almost every night, and during the daylight hours flocks of alabaster birds passed overhead. At night they roosted in the orchards above the village and when Christopher woke up and looked outside at the moonlit panorama of valley and mountains, it seemed that snow had fallen on the trees as well. These birds always flew over Tifawt at this time of the year, Lla Kahina said; she did not know their names. “What would be the point?” she said. “Naturally the French gave them all Latin names. Cataloguing is one of their passions, but no one else was interested.”
“Not even Zarah?”
“No. She’s like her mother in that respect. Cathy never knew the name for anything, or where she was on the surface of the earth. She was quite a young soul, I think. Language was a mystery to her. Do you hear that?” The muezzin was calling the late afternoon prayer. “That was her favorite sound. She could understand it because it’s a kind of music. But she never guessed, even though she lived among the Ja’wabi for twenty-two years, that we weren’t Moslems. Right up to the end she asked me questions about Islam.”
“That’s a tribute to your tradecraft, I guess. But there are other things that could be said about it. Why didn’t you tell her the truth?”
“Because I wasn’t free to do so. Any more than I was free to tell Zarah about you against her mother’s wishes.”
“Is that the only reason?”
“What other reason did I need? Also, she wasn’t Ja’wabi.”
“Neither was Barney Wolkowicz.”
“He found out everything for himself. In a single day.”
“What about Zarah?”
“She took in the truth with the milk she drank.”
“Not Cathy’s milk.”
“No. Ja’wabi milk.”
“Did that make her Ja’wabi?”
“It satisfied a custom that everybody understands. But even before she was born she was already what she was.”
All this was said in a light, even playful tone of voice, as if Lla Kahina believed that she was telling Christopher things that he had long known but may have forgotten—stories about a remote, poor, but interesting branch of the family. He was not diverted from his real line of thought.
“And what was it, exactly, that Zarah already was?” he asked.
“Exactly? No one can say exactly because not everything has happened yet,” she replied. “But she belongs here. She is going to do some great thing in this lifetime.”
“What great thing?”
“She will show us when the time comes. Zarah is not a young soul. I think she may be living her last life. She has some debt to pay the Ja’wabi. That’s why she’s here. Every Ja’wabi feels it. That’s because of the story of her birth. I knew she was someone like that even before she reached out of the womb and touched me.”
“She touched you?”
“Yes. She held on to my finger while I tied the red thread around her wrist, then let go. It was the grip of a person who knew me.”
“But you say you knew even before that she was … whatever you think she is. How long before?”
“Since the first time I saw her in the cards. In Otto Rothchild’s house on the lake of Geneva on the day I met Cathy.”
“What did you see?”
“Will you be able to believe what I tell you?”
“Believe it or understand it?”
“No one can understand it, not even me. I saw her as she is now, but, at the same time, as she was in the past. This often happens. At first I thought I was seeing your mother as she had been in another life a long time ago, but then I realized it was only a resemblance. It was your child I saw.”
Christopher did not ask her how she had known this. He said, “Do you often see my mother in the cards?”
Before answering, Lla Kahina looked up at the patch of cloudless sky above her garden.
“Always,” she said, and when she lowered her eyes to look directly into his face, he saw that she was weeping.
He said, “Tell me about Heydrich.”
“About Heydrich? How much do you know already?”
“What’s in The Rose and the Lotus. And what Zarah overheard you telling Wolkowicz.”
“Then you know almost everything.”
8
SHE TOLD HIM THE REST, AS FAR AS SHE KNEW IT. ONE MORNING IN August 1939, after they had finished their pastries and coffee and Meryem had read the cards, Heydrich suddenly decided that he would keep Meryem.
“Keep her?” Lori said. “What do you mean, ‘keep her’?”
“It is a necessity,” Heydrich replied. “I foresaw that this might occur, so I have arranged to have a special room prepared upstairs.”
He himself marched Meryem upstairs and locked her in a room. It looked like an ordinary bedroom, with dresser, wardrobe, and narrow bed with a gray army blanket folded in regulation manner at the foot. A loaf of black bread, a jug of water, and a pack of cards had been placed on the table. But there was a judas hole in the door and bars on the window; geraniums grew in a flower box.
