Страница:
Diamond leaned back and shook his head. “An eight-hour lag. That could hurt us someday.”
“It’s not Fat Boy’s fault, sir. It’s an effect of rising world population and our own information explosion. Sometimes I think we know too much about people!” The First Assistant chuckled at the very idea. “By the way, sir, did you notice the rephrase?”
“Which rephrase?”
“THISMAN is now expressed as THISPERSON. Fat Boy must have digested the Mother Company’s becoming an equal opportunity employer.” The First Assistant could not keep the pride from his voice.
“That’s wonderful,” Diamond said without energy.
Miss Swivven entered from the machine room and placed five telephotos on Diamond’s desk, then she took her position below his dais, her note pad at the ready.
Diamond shuffled through the photographs for that of the only member of the Munich Five not known to be dead: Hannah Stern. He scanned the face, nodded to himself, and sighed fatalistically. These CIA imbeciles!
The First Assistant turned from his console and adjusted his glasses nervously. “What’s wrong, sir?”
His eyes half closed as he looked through the floor-to-ceiling window at the Washington Monument threatening to violate that same chubby cloud that always hung in the evening sky at this time. Diamond tapped his upper lip with his knuckle. “Did you read Starr’s action report?”
“I scanned it, sir. Mostly checking for spelling.”
“What was the ostensible destination of those Israeli youngsters?”
The First Assistant always felt uncomfortable with Mr. Diamond’s rhetorical style of thinking aloud. He did not like answering questions without the aid of Fat Boy. “As I recall, their destination was London.”
“Right. Presumably intending to intercept certain Palestinian terrorists at Heathrow Airport before they could hijack a plane to Montreal. All right. If the Munich Five team were going to London, why did they disembark at Rome? Flight 414 from Tel Aviv is a through flight to London with stops at Rome and Paris.”
“Well, sir, there could be several—”
“And why were they going to England six days before their Black September targets were due to fly out to Montreal? Why sit in the open in London for all that time, when they could have stayed securely at home?”
“Well, perhaps they—”
“And why were they carrying tickets to Pau?”
“Pau, sir?”
“Starr’s action report. Bottom of page thirty-two through middle of page thirty-four. Description of contents of victims’ knapsacks and clothing. List prepared by Italian police. It includes two plane tickets for Pau.”
The First Assistant did not mention that he had no idea where Pau was. He made a mental note to ask Fat Boy first chance he got. “What does all this mean, sir?”
“It means that once again CIA has lived up to the traditions of Bay of Pigs and Watergate. Once again, they have screwed up.” Diamond’s jaw tightened. “The mindless voters of this country are wrong to worry about the dangers of CIA’s internal corruption. When they bring this nation to disaster, it won’t be through their villainy; it will be because of their bungling.” He returned to his pristine desk and picked up the telephoto of Hannah Stern. “Fat Boy interrupted himself with that correction while it was backgrounding this Hannah Stern. Start me up on that again. And give me a little more depth.”
Evaluating both the data and the gaps, Diamond analyzed Miss Stern to be a fairly common sort found on the fringes of terrorist action. Young, intelligent mid-American, cause-oriented. He knew the type. She would have been a Liberal, back when that was still fashionable. She was the kind who sought “relevance” in everything; who expressed her lack of critical judgment as freedom from prejudice; who worried about Third World hunger, but shambled about a university campus with a huge protein-gobbling dog—symbol of her love for all living things.
She first came to Israel on a summer tour at a kibbutz, her purpose being to visit her uncle and—in her own words quoted in a NSA lift from a letter home—”to discover my Jewishness.”
Diamond could not repress a sigh when he read that phrase. Miss Stern obviously suffered from the democratic delusion that all people are created interesting.
Fat Boy ascribed a low coefficient of irritant potential to Miss Stern, regarding her as a typical young American intellectual woman seeking a cause to justify her existence, until marriage, career, or artsy hobbies defused her. Her personality analysis turned up none of those psychotic warps that produce the urban guerrilla who finds sexual expression in violence. Nor was she flawed by that desperate hunger for notoriety that causes actors and entertainers who, unable to remain in the public eye by virtue of their talents, suddenly discover hitherto unnoticed social convictions.
No, there was nothing in Hannah Stern’s printout that would nominate her for particular attention—save for two facts: She was Asa Stern’s niece. And she was the only surviving member of the Munich Five.
Diamond spoke to Miss Swivven. “Have Starr and that Arab… Mr. Haman… in the screening room in ten minutes.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And have the Deputy there too.” He turned to the First Assistant. “You keep working on Fat Boy. I want a deep rescan of the leader, this Asa Stern. He’s the one who will bleed through. Give me a list of his first-generation contacts: family, friends, accomplices, associates, acquaintances, affairs, and so on.”
“Just a second, sir.” The First Assistant introduced two questions into the computer, then one modifier. “Ah… sir? The first-generation list will have… ah… three hundred twenty-seven names, together with thumbnail sketches. And we’ll cube as we move to second-generation lists—friends of friends, etc. That’ll give us almost thirty-five million names. Obviously, sir, we have to have some kind of priority criterion.”
The First Assistant was right; a critical decision; there are literally thousands of ways in which a list can be ordered.
Diamond thought back over the sketch on Asa Stern. His intuition was tickled by one line: Profession and/or cover… Farmer, Journalist, Poet, Historian. Not, then, a typical terrorist. Something worse—a romantic patriot.
“Order the list emotionally. Go for indices indicating love, friendship, trust—this sort of thing. Go from closest to most distant.”
The First Assistant’s eyes shone as he took a deep breath and lightly rubbed his fingers together. This was a fine challenge demanding console virtuosity. Love, friendship, trust—these imprecisions and shadows could not be located through approaches resembling the Schliemann Back-bit and Non-bit Theory. No computer, not even Fat Boy, can respond to such rubrics directly. Questions have to be phrased in terms of nonfrequency counts and non sequitur exchange relationships. In its simplest form, actions performed for no measurable reason, or contrary to linear logic, might indicate such underlying motives as love or friendship or trust. But great care had to be exercised, because identical actions could derive from hate, insanity, or blackmail. Moreover, in the case of love, the nature of the action seldom helps to identify its motivational impulse. Particularly difficult is separating love from blackmail.
It was a delicious assignment, infinitely complicated. As he began to insert the first probes into Fat Boy, the First Assistant’s shoulders twisted back and forth, as though he were guiding a pinball with body-english.
Miss Swivven returned to the work room. “They’re waiting for you in the theater, sir.”
“Good. Bring those telephotos along. What on earth is wrong with you, Miss Swivven?”
“Nothing, sir. My back itches, that’s all.”
“For Christ’s sake.”
Darryl Starr sensed trouble in the air when he and the Arab received curt orders to report to the viewing room at once. His fears were confirmed when he found his direct superior sitting gloomily in the auditorium. The Deputy International Liaison Duty Officer nodded a curt greeting to Starr and grunted once toward the Arab. He blamed the oil-rich Arabian sheikhdoms for many of his current problems, not the least of which was the interfering presence of Mr. Diamond in the bowels of the CIA, with his snide attitude toward every little operational peccadillo.
When first the oil-producing Arabs had run a petroleum boycott against the industrialized West to blackmail them into withdrawing their moral and legal commitments to Israel, the Deputy and other leaders of CIA proposed putting on line Contingency Plan NE385/8 (Operation Six Second War). In terms of this plan, CIA-sponsored troops of the Orthodox Islamic Maoist Falange would rescue the Arab states from the temptations of greed by occupying more than 80 percent of its oil facilities in an action calculated to require less than one minute of actual combat, although it was universally admitted that an additional three months would be required to round up such Arab and Egyptian troops as had fled in panic as far as Rhodesia and Scandinavia.
It was agreed that Operation Six Second War would be undertaken without burdening the President or Congress with those decision-making responsibilities so onerous in an election year. Phase One was instituted, and political leaders in both Black and Muslim Africa experienced an epidemic of assassinations, one or two at the hands of members of the victim’s own family. Phase Two was in countdown, when suddenly everything froze up. Evidence concerning CIA operations was leaked to congressional investigating committees; lists of CIA agents were released to Leftist newspapers in France, Italy, and the Near East; internal CIA communications began to be jammed; massive tape erasures occurred in CIA memory banks, denying them the “biographic leverage” with which they normally controlled American elected officials.
Then one afternoon, Mr. Diamond and his modest staff walked into the Center carrying orders and directives that gave the Mother Company total control over all operations touching, either directly or tangentially, the oil-producing nations. Neither the Deputy nor his colleagues had ever heard of this “Mother Company,” so a quick briefing was in order. They learned that the Mother Company was a consortium of major international petroleum, communications, and transportation corporations that effectively controlled the Western World’s energy and information. After some consideration, the Mother Company had decided that she could not permit CIA to continue meddling in affairs that might harm or irritate those oil-producing friends in consort with whom she had been able to triple profits in two years.
No one at CIA seriously considered opposing Mr. Diamond and the Mother Company, which controlled the careers of most major governmental figures, not only through direct support, but also by the technique of using their public media subsidiaries to blacken and demoralize potential candidates, and to shape what the American masses took to be the Truth.
What chance had the scandal-ridden CIA to resist a force with enough power to build pipelines through tundra that had been demonstrated to be ecologically fragile? Who could stand against the organization that had reduced government research spending on solar, wind, tidal, and geothermal energy to a placating trickle, so as to avoid competition with their own atomic and fossil-fuel consorda? How could CIA effectively oppose a group with such overwhelming dominance that She was able, in conjunction with its Pentagon flunkies, to make the American public accept the storage of atomic wastes with lethal half-lives so long that failure and disaster were absolutely assured by the laws of antichance?
In Her takeover of CIA, the Mother Company had no interference from the executive branch of the government, as it was nearing election time, and all public business is arrested during this year of flesh-bartering. Nor did She really worry about the post-election pause of three years before the next democratic convulsion, for the American version of representative government assures that such qualities of intellect and ethics as might equip a man to lead a powerful nation responsibly are precisely the qualities that would prevent him from subjecting himself to the debasing performances of vote begging and delegate swapping. It is a truism of American politics that no man who can win an election deserves to.
There was one awkward moment for the Mother Company when a group of naïve young Senators decided to inquire into Arab millions in short-term paper that allowed them to manipulate American banks and hold the nation’s economy hostage against the possibility—however remote—that the United States might attempt to fulfill its moral commitments to Israel. But these probes were cut short by Kuwait’s threat to withdraw its money and crumble the banks, should the Senate pursue. With exceptional rhetorical adroitness, the committee reported that they could not say with certainty that the nation was vulnerable to blackmail, because they had not been permitted to continue their investigations.
This was the background to the Deputy’s feelings of petulance over loss of control of his organization as he heard the doors of the auditorium bang open. He rose to his feet as Diamond entered at a brisk pace, followed by Miss Swivven who carried several rip-sheets from the Fat Boy printout and the stack of photographs of members of the Munich Five.
In minimal recognition of Diamond’s arrival, Starr lifted most of the weight off his butt, then settled back with a grunt. The Arab’s response to Miss Swivven’s arrival was to jump to his feet, grin, and bow in jerky imitation of European suavity. Very nice looking woman, he told himself. Very lush. Skin like snow. And most gifted in what, in English, is referred to as the knockers.
“Is the projectionist in the booth?” Diamond asked, sitting apart from the others.
“Yes, sir,” Starr drawled. “You fixin’ to see the film again?”
“I want you fools to see it again.”
The Deputy was not pleased to be grouped with a mere agent, and even less with an Arab, but he had learned to suffer in silence. It was his senior administrative skill.
“You never told us you wanted to see the film,” Starr said. “I don’t think the projectionist has rewound it yet.”
“Have him run it backward. It doesn’t matter.”
Starr gave instructions through the intercom, and the wall lights dimmed.
“Starr?”
“Sir?”
“Put out the cigar.”
…the elevator door opens and closes on the dead Japanese gunman’s head. The man returns to life and slides up the wall. The hole in his palm disappears, and he tugs the bullet out of his back. He runs backward through a gaggle of schoolchildren, one of whom floats up from the floor as a red stain on her dress is sucked back into her stomach. When he reaches the lightblurred main entrance, the Japanese ducks as fragments of broken glass rush together to form a window pane. The second gunman jumps up from the floor and catches a flying automatic weapon, and the two of them run backward, until a swish pan leaves them and discovers an Israeli boy on the tiled floor. A vacuum snaps the top of his skull back into place; the stream of gore recoils back into his hip. He leaps up and runs backward, snatching up his rucksack as he passes it. The camera waves around, then finds the second Israeli just in time to see his cheek pop on. He rises from his knees, and blood implodes into his chest as the khaki shirt instantly mends itself. The two boys walk backward. One turns and smiles. They saunter back through a group of Italians pushing and standing tiptoe to greet some arriving relative. They back down the lane to the immigration counter, and the Italian official uses his rubber stamp to suck the entrance permissions off their passports. A red-headed girl shakes her head, then smiles thanks…
“Stop!” called Mr. Diamond, startling Miss Swivven, who had never heard him raise his voice before.
The girl on the screen froze, a blow-back douser dimming the image to prevent the frame from burning.
“See that girl. Starr?”
“Sure.”
“Can you tell me anything about her?”
Starr was confused by this seemingly arbitrary demand. He knew he was in trouble of some sort, and he fell back on his habit of taking cover behind his dumb, good-ol’-boy facade.
“Well… let’s see. She’s got a fair set of boobs, that’s for sure. Taut little ass. A little skinny in the arms and waist for my taste but, like my ol’ daddy used to say: the closer the bone, the sweeter the meat!” He forced a husky laugh in which he was joined by the Arab, who was anxious to prove he understood.
“Starr?” Diamond’s voice was monotonic and dense. “I want you to do something for me. For the next few hours, I want you to try very hard to stop being an ass. I don’t want you to entertain me, and I don’t want you to supplement your answers with folksy asides. There is nothing funny about what is going on here. True to the traditions of the CIA, you have screwed up, Starr. Do you understand that?”
There was silence as the Deputy considered objecting to this defamation, but thought better of it.
“Starr? Do you understand that?”
A sigh, then quietly, “Yes, sir.”
The Deputy cleared his throat and spoke in his most authoritative voice. “If there’s anything the Agency can—”
“Starr? Do you recognize this girl?” Diamond asked.
Miss Swivven took the photograph from its folder and sidled down the aisle to Starr and the Arab.
Starr tilted the print to see it better in the dim light. “Yes, sir.”
“Who is it?”
“It’s the girl up there on the screen.”
“That’s right. Her name is Hannah Stern. Her uncle was Asa Stern, organizer of the Munich Five. She was the third member of the commando team.”
“Third?” Starr asked. “But… we were told there were only two of them on the plane.”
“Who told you that?”
“It was in the intelligence report we got from this fella here.”
“That is correct, Mr. Diamond,” the Arab put in. “Our intelligence men…”
But Diamond had closed his eyes and was shaking his head slowly. “Starr? Are you telling me that you based an operation on information provided by Arab sources?”
“Well, we… Yes, sir.” Starr’s voice was deflated. Put that way, it did seem a stupid thing to do. It was like having Italians do your political organization, or the British handle your industrial relations.
“It seems to me,” the Deputy injected, “that if we have made an error based on faulty input from your Arab friends, they have to accept a goodly part of the responsibility.”
“You’re wrong,” Diamond said. “But I suppose you’re used to that. They don’t have to accept anything. They own the oil.”
The Arab representative smiled and nodded. “You reflect exactly the thinking of my president and uncle, who has often said that—”
“All right.” Diamond rose. “The three of you remain on tap. In less than an hour, I’ll call for you. I have background data coming in now. It’s still possible that I may be able to make up for your bungling.” He walked up the aisle, followed closely by Miss Swivven.
The Deputy cleared his throat to say something, then decided that the greater show of strength lay in silence. He fixed a long stare on Starr, glanced away from the Arab in dismissal, then left the theater.
“Well, buddy,” Starr said as he pushed himself out of the theater seat, “we better get a bite to eat while the gettin’s good. Looks like the shit has hit the fan.”
The Arab chuckled and nodded, as he tried to envision an ardent supporter of sports fouled with camel dung.
For a time, the empty theater was dominated by the frozen image of Hannah Stern, smiling down from the screen. When the projectionist started to run the film out, it jammed. An amoeba of brown, bubbly scab spread rapidly over the young lady and consumed her.
Etchebar
Hannah Stern sat at a café table under the arcade surrounding the central place of Tardets. She stared numbly into the lees of her coffee, thick and granular. Sunlight was dazzling on the white buildings of the square; the shadows under the arcade were black and chill. From within the café behind her came the voices of four old Basque men playing mousse, to the accompaniment of a litany of bai… passo… passo… alla Jainkoa!… passo… alla Jainkoa… this last phrase passing through all conceivable permutations of stress and accent as the players bluffed, signaled, lied, and called upon God to witness this shit they had been dealt, or to punish this fool of a partner with whom God had punished them.
For the last seven hours, Hannah Stern had alternated between clawing through nightmare reality and floating upon escapist fantasy, between confusion and vertigo. She was stunned by emotional shock, spiritually evacuated. And now, teetering on the verge of nervous disintegration, she felt infinitely calm… even a little sleepy.
The real, the unreal; the important, the insignificant; the Now, the Then; the cool of her arcade, the rippling heat of the empty public square; these voices chanting in Europe’s most ancient language… it was all indifferently tangled. It was all happening to someone else, someone for whom she felt great pity and sympathy, but whom she could not help. Someone past help.
After the massacre in Rome International, she had somehow got all the way from Italy to this café in a Basque market town. Dazed and mentally staggering, she had traveled fifteen hundred kilometers in nine hours. But now, with only another four or five kilometers to go, she had used up the last of her nervous energy. Her adrenaline well was empty, and it appeared that she was going to be defeated at the last moment by the caprice of a bumbling café owner.
First there had been terror and confusion at seeing her comrades shot down, neurasthenic incredulity during which she stood frozen as people rushed past her, knocking against her. More gunshots. Loud wailing from the family of Italians who had been awaiting a relative. Then panic clutched her; she walked blindly ahead, toward the main entrance of the terminal, toward the sunlight. She was breathing orally, shallow pants. Policemen rushed past her. She told herself to keep walking. Then she realized that the muscles in the small of her back were knotted painfully in anticipation of the bullet that never came. She passed an old man with a white goatee, sitting on the floor with his legs straight out before him, like a child at play. She could see no wound, but the pool of dark blood in which he sat was growing slowly wider. He did not seem to be in pain. He looked up at her interrogatively. She couldn’t make herself stop. Their eyes locked together as she walked by. She muttered stupidly, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
A fat woman in the group of waiting relatives was hysterical, wailing and choking. More attention was being paid to her than to the fallen members of the family. She was, after all, Mama.
Over the confusion, the running and shouting, a calm, singsong voice announced the first call for passengers on Air France flight 470 for Toulouse, Tarbes, and Pau. The recorded voice was ignorant of the chaos beneath its loudspeakers. When the announcement was repeated in French, the last fragment stuck to Hannah’s consciousness. Gate Eleven. Gate Eleven.
The stewardess reminded Hannah to put up her seat back. “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.” A minute later, on her return down the aisle, the hostess reminded her to buckle her seat belt. “What? Oh, yes. I’m sorry.”
The plane rose into thin cloud, then into crisp infinite blue. The drone of engines; the vibration of the fuselage. Hannah shivered with vulnerability and aloneness. There was a middle-aged man seated beside her, reading a magazine. From time to time his eyes slipped over the top of the page and glanced quickly at her suntanned legs below the khaki shorts. She could feel his eyes on her, and she buttoned one of the top two buttons of her shirt. The man smiled and cleared his throat. He was going to speak to her! The stupid son of a bitch was going to try to pick her up! My God!
And suddenly she was sick.
She made it to the toilet, where she knelt in the cramped space and vomited into the bowl. When she emerged, pale and fragile, the imprint of floor tile on her knees, the stewardess was solicitous but slightly superior, imagining that a short flight like this had made her airsick.
The plane banked on its approach to Pau, and Hannah looked out the window at the panorama of the Pyrenees, snow-tipped and sharp in the crystalline air, like a sea of whitecaps frozen in midstorm. Beautiful and awful.
Somewhere there, at the Basque end of the range, Nicholai Hel lived. If she could only get to Mr. Hel…
It was not until she was out of the terminal and standing in the chill sunlight of the Pyrenees that it occurred to her that she had no money. Avrim had carried all their money. She would have to hitchhike, and she didn’t know the route. Well, she could ask the drivers. She knew that she would have no trouble getting rides. When you’re pretty and young… and big-busted…
Her first ride took her into Pau, and the driver offered to find her a place to stay for the night. Instead, she talked him into taking her to the outskirts and directing her to Tardets. It must have been a hard car to shift, because his hand twice slipped off the lever and brushed her leg.
She got her next ride almost immediately. No, he wasn’t going to Tardets. Only as far as Oléron. But he could find her a place to stay for the night…
One more car, one more suggestive driver, and Hannah reached the little village of Tardets, where she sought further directions at the café. The first barrier she met was the local accent, langue d’oc with heavy overlays of Soultine Basque in which une petite cuillè has eight syllables.
“What are you looking for?” the café owner asked, his eyes leaving her breasts only to stray to her legs.
“I’m trying to find the Château of Etchebar. The house of M. Nicholai Hel.”
The proprietor frowned, squinted at the arches overhead, and scratched with one finger under the beret that Basque men take off only in bed, in coffin, or when adjudicating the game of rebot. No, he did not believe he had ever heard the name. Hel, you say? (He could pronounce the h because it is a Basque sound.) Perhaps his wife knew. He would ask. Would the Mademoiselle take something while she waited? She ordered coffee which came, thick, bitter, and often reheated, in a tin pot half the weight of which was tinker’s solder, but which leaked nevertheless. The proprietor seemed to regret the leak, but to accept it with heavy fatalism. He hoped the coffee that dripped on her leg had not burned her. It was not hot enough to burn? Good. Good. He disappeared into the back of the café, ostensibly to inquire after M. Hel.
And that had been fifteen minutes ago.
Hannah’s eyes dilated painfully as she looked out toward the bright square, deserted save for a litter of cars, mostly Deu’ches bearing ‘64 plates, parked at random angles, wherever their peasant drivers had managed to stop them.
With deafening roar of motor, grinding of gears, and outspewing of filthy exhaust, a German juggernaut lorry painfully navigated the corner with not ten centimeters to spare between vehicle and the crepi facades of the buildings. Sweating, cranking the wheel, and hiss-popping his air brakes, the German driver managed to introduce the monster into the ancient square, only to be met by the most formidable of barriers. Waddling side by side down the middle of the street, two Basque women with blank, coarse faces exchanged gossip out of the corners of their mouths. Middle-aged, dour, and vast, they plodded along on great barrel legs, indifferent to the frustration and fury of the truck driver, who crawled behind them muttering earnest imprecations and beating his fist against the steering wheel.
Hannah Stern had no way to appreciate this scene’s iconographic representation of Franco-German relations in the Common Market, and at this moment the café owner reappeared, his triangular Basque face abeam with sudden comprehension.
“You are seeking M. Hel!” he told her.
“That’s what I said.”
“Ah, if I had known it was M. Hel you were seeking…” He shrugged from the waist, lifting his palms in a gesture implying that a little more clarity on her part would have saved them both a lot of trouble.
He then gave her directions to the Château d’Etchebar: first cross the gave from Tardets (the r rolled, both the t and the s pronounced), then pass through the village of Abense-de-Haut (five syllables, the h and t both pronounced) and on up through Lichans (no nasal, s pronounced), then take the right forking up into the hills of Etchebar; but not the left forking, which would carry you to Licq.
“Is it far?”
“No, not all that far. But you don’t want to go to Licq, anyway.”
“I mean to Etchebar! Is it far to Etchebar!” In her fatigue and nervous tension, the formidable task of getting simple information out of a Basque was becoming too much for Hannah.
“No, not far. Maybe two kilometers after Lichans.”
“And how far is it to Lichans?”
He shrugged. “Oh, it could be two kilometers after Abense-de-Haut. You can’t miss it. Unless you turn left at the forking. Then you’ll miss it all right! You’ll miss it because you’ll be in Licq, don’t you see.”
The old mousse players had forsaken their game and were gathered behind the café owner, intrigued by all the confusion this foreign tourist was causing. They held a brief discussion in Basque, agreeing at last that if the girl took the left forking she would indeed end up in Licq. But then, Licq was not such a bad village. Was there not the famous story of the bridge at Licq built with the help of the Little People from the mountains who then…
“Listen!” Hannah pled. “Is there someone who could drive me to the Château of Etchebar?”
A quick conference was held between the café owner and the mousse players. There was some argument and a considerable amount of clarification and restatement of positions. Then the proprietor delivered the consensus opinion.
“No.”
It had been decided that this foreign girl wearing walking shorts and who had a rucksack was one of the young athletic tourists who were notorious for being friendly, but for tipping very little. Therefore, there was no one who would drive her to Etchebar, except for the oldest of the mousse players, who was willing to gamble on her generosity, but sadly he had no car. And anyway, he did not know how to drive.
With a sigh, Hannah took up her rucksack. But when the café owner reminded her of the cup of coffee, she remembered she had no French money. She explained this with expressions of lighthearted contrition, trying to laugh off the ludicrousness of the situation. But he steadfastly stared at the cup of unpaid-for coffee, and remained dolefully silent. The mousse players discussed this new turn of events with animation. What? The tourist took coffee without the money to pay for it? It was not impossible that this was a matter for the law.
Finally, the proprietor sighed a rippling sigh and looked up at her, tragedy in his moist eyes. Was she really telling him that she didn’t have two francs for the coffee—forget the tip—just two francs for the coffee? There was a matter of principle involved here. After all, he paid for his coffee; he paid for the gas to heat the water; and every couple of years he paid the tinker to mend the pot. He was a man who paid his debts. Unlike some others he could mention.
Hannah was between anger and laughter. She could not believe that all these heavy theatrics were being produced for two francs. (She did not know that the price of a cup of coffee was, in fact, one franc.) She had never before met that especially French version of avarice in which money—the coin itself—is the center of all consideration, more important than goods, comfort, dignity. Indeed, more important than real wealth. She had no way to know that, although they bore Basque names, these village people had become thoroughly French under the corrosive cultural pressures of radio, television, and state-controlled education, in which modern history is creatively interpreted to confect that national analgesic, la vérité à la Cinquième République.
Dominated by the mentality of the petit commercant, these village Basques shared the Gallic view of gain in which the pleasure of earning a hundred francs is nothing beside the intense suffering caused by the loss of a centime.
Finally realizing that his dumb show of pain and disappointment was not going to extract the two francs from this young girl, the proprietor excused himself with sardonic politeness, telling her be would be right back.
When he returned twenty minutes later, after a tense conference with his wife in the back room, he asked, “You are a friend of M. Hel?”
“Yes,” Hannah lied, not wanting to go into all that.
“I see. Well then, I shall assume that Mr. Hel will pay, should you fail to.” He tore a sheet from the note pad provided by the Byrrh distributors and wrote something on it before folding it two times, sharpening the creases with his thumbnail. “Please give this to M. Hell,” he said coldly.
His eyes no longer flicked to her breast and legs. Some things are more important than romance.
Hannah had been walking for more than an hour, over the Pont d’Abense and the glittering Gave de Saison, then slowly up into the Basque hills along a narrow tar road softened by the sun and confined by ancient stone walls over which lizards scurried at her approach. In the fields sheep grazed, lambs teetering beside the ewes, and russet vaches de pyrénées loitered in the shade of unkempt apple trees, watching her pass, their eyes infinitely gentle, infinitely stupid. Round hills lush with fern contained and comforted the narrow valley, and beyond the saddles of the hills rose the snow-tipped mountains, their jagged arêtes sharply traced on the taut blue sky. High above, a hawk balanced on the rim of an updraft, its wing feathers splayed like fingers constantly feeling the wind as it scanned the ground for prey.
The heat stewed a heady medley of aroma: the soprano of wild-flower, the mezzotones of cut grass and fresh sheep droppings, the insistent basso profundo of softened tar.
Insulated by fatigue from the sights and smells around her, Hannah plodded along, her head down and her concentration absorbed in watching the toes of her hiking boots. Her mind, recoiling from the sensory overload of the last ten hours, was finding haven in a tunnel-vision of the consciousness. She did not dare to think, to imagine, to remember; because looming out there, just beyond the edges of here-and-now, were visions that would damage her, if she let them in. Don’t think. Just walk, and watch the toes of your boots. It is all about getting to the Château d’Etchebar. It is all about contacting Nicholai Hel. There is nothing before or beyond that.
She came to a forking in the road and stopped. To the right, the way rose steeply toward the hilltop village of Etchebar, and beyond the huddle of stone and crepi houses she could see the wide mansard facade of what must be the château peeking between tall pine trees and surrounded by a high stone wall.
She sighed deeply and trudged on, her fatigue blending with protective emotional neurasthenia. If she could just make the château… just get to Nicholai Hel…
Two peasant women in black dresses paused in their gossip over a low stone wall and watched the outlander girl with open curiosity and mistrust. Where was she going, this hussy showing her legs? Toward the château? Ah well, that explained it. All sorts of strange people go to the château ever since that foreigner bought it! Not that M. Hel was a bad man. Indeed, their husbands had told them he was much admired by the Basque freedom movement. But still… he was a newcomer. No use denying it. He had lived in the château only fourteen years, while everyone else in the village (ninety-three souls) could find his name on dozens of gravestones around the church, sometimes newly cut into pyrenean granite, sometimes barely legible on ancient stone scrubbed smooth by five centuries of rain and wind. Look! The hussy has not even bound her breasts! She wants men to look at her, that’s what it is! She will have a nameless child if she is not careful! Who would marry her then? She will end up cutting vegetables and scrubbing floors in the household of her sister. And her sister’s husband will pester her when he is drunk! And one day, when the sister is too far along with child to be able to do it, this one will succumb to the husband! Probably in the barn. It always happens so. And the sister will find out, and she will drive this one from the house! Where will she go then? She will become a whore in Bayonne, that’s what!
A third woman joined the two. Who is that girl showing her legs? We know nothing about her—except that she is a whore from Bayonne. And not even Basque! Do you think she might be a Protestant? Oh no, I wouldn’t go that far. Just a poor putain who has slept with the husband of her sister. It is what always happens, if you go about with your breasts unbound.
True, true.
As she passed, Hannah looked up and noticed the three women. “Bonjour, mesdames,” she said.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” they chanted together, smiling in the open Basque way. “You are giving yourself a walk?” one asked.
“Yes, Madame.”
“That’s nice. You are lucky to have the leisure.”
An elbow nudged, and was nudged back. It was daring and clever to come so close to saying it.
“You are looking for the château, Mademoiselle?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Just keep going as you are, and you will find what you’re looking for.”
A nudge; another nudge. It was dangerous, but deliciously witty, to come so close to saying it.
Hannah stood before the heavy iron gates. There was no one in sight, and there did not seem to be any way of ringing or knocking. The château was set back a hundred meters, up a long curving allée of trees. Uncertain, she decided to try one of the smaller gates down the road, when a voice behind her asked in a singsong, “Mademoiselle?”
She returned to the gate where an old gardener in blue working apron was peering out from the other side of the barrier. “I am looking for M. Hel,” she explained.
“Yes,” the gardener said, with that inhaled “oui” that can mean almost anything, except yes. He told her to wait there, and he disappeared into the curving row of trees. A minute later she heard the hinges creak on one of the side gates, and he beckoned her with a rolling arm and a deep bow that almost cost him his balance. As she passed him, she realized that he was half-drunk. In fact, Pierre was never drunk. Also, he was never sober. The regular spacing of his daily twelve glasses of red protected him from either of those excesses.
Pierre pointed the way, but did not accompany her to the house; he returned to trimming the box hedges that formed a labyrinth. He never worked in haste, and he never avoided work, his day punctuated, refreshed, and blurred by his glass of red every half hour or so.
Hannah could hear the clip-clip-clip of his shears, the sound receding as she walked up the allée between tall blue-green cedars, the drooping branches of which wept and undulated, brushing the shadows with long kelplike sweeps. A susurrant wind hissed high in the trees like tide over sand, and the dense shade was chill. She shivered. She was dizzy after the long hot walk, having taken nothing but coffee all day long. Her emotions had been frozen by fear, then melted by despair. Frozen, then melted. Her hold on reality was slipping.
When she reached the foot of a double rank of marble steps ascending to the terraces, she stopped, uncertain which way to go.
“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked from above.
Hannah shaded her eyes and looked up toward the sunny terrace. “Hello. I am Hannah Stern.”
“Well, come up, Hannah Stern.” With the sunlight behind the woman, Hannah could not see her features, but from her dress and manner she seemed to be Oriental, although her voice, soft and modulated, belied the twittering stereotype of feminine Oriental speech. “We have one of those coincidences that are supposed to bring luck. My name is Hana—almost the same as yours. In Japanese, hana means flower. What does your Hannah mean? Perhaps, like so many Western names, it means nothing. How delightful of you to come just in time for tea.”
They shook hands in the French fashion, and Hannah was struck by the calm beauty of this woman, whose eyes seemed to regard her with a mixture of kindness and humor, and whose manner made Hannah feel oddly protected and at ease. As they walked together across the broad flagstone terrace toward the house with its classic facade of four porte-fenêtres flanking the main entrance, the woman selected the best bloom from the flowers she had been cutting and offered it to Hannah with a gesture as natural as it was pleasant. “I must put these in water,” she said. “Then we shall take our tea. You are a friend of Nicholai?”
“No, not really. My uncle was a friend of his.”
“And you are looking him up in passing. How thoughtful of you.” She opened the glass doors to a sunny reception room in the middle of which tea things were laid out on a low table before a marble fireplace with a brass screen. A door on the other side of the room clicked closed just as they entered. During the few days she was to spend at the Château d’Etchebar, all Hannah would ever see or hear of staff and servants would be doors that closed as she entered, or soft tiptoeing at the end of the hall, or the appearance of coffee or flowers on a bedside table. Meals were prepared in such a way that the mistress of the house could do the serving herself. It was an opportunity for her to show kindness and concern.
“Just leave your rucksack there in the corner, Hannah,” the woman said. “And would you be so good as to pour, while I arrange these flowers?”
With sunlight flooding in through the French windows, walls of light blue, moldings of gold leaf, furniture blending Louis XV and oriental inlays, threads of gray vapor twisting up from the teapot through a shaft of sunlight, mirrors everywhere lightening, reflecting, doubling and tripling everything; this room was not in the same world as that in which young men are shot down in airports. As she poured from a silver teapot into Limoges with a vaguely Chinese feeling, Hannah was overwhelmed by reality vertigo. Too much had happened in these last hours. She was afraid she was going to faint.
For no reason, she remembered feelings of dislocation like this when she was a child in school… it was summer, and she was bored, and there was the drone of study all around her. She had stared until objects became big/little. And she had asked herself, “Am I me? Am I here? Is this really me thinking these thoughts? Me? Me?”
And now, as she watched the graceful, economical movements of this slender Oriental woman stepping back to criticize the flower arrangement, then making a slight correction, Hannah tried desperately to find anchorage against the tide of confusion and fatigue that was tugging her away.
That’s odd, she thought. Of all that had happened that day: the horrible things in the airport, the dreamlike flight to Pau, the babbling suggestive talk of the drivers she had gotten rides from, that fool of a café-owner in Tardets, the long walk up the shimmering road to Etchebar… of all of it, the most profound image was her walk up the cedar-lined allée in subaqueous shadow… shivering in the dense shadow as the wind made sea sounds in the trees. It was another world. And odd.
For the last seven hours, Hannah Stern had alternated between clawing through nightmare reality and floating upon escapist fantasy, between confusion and vertigo. She was stunned by emotional shock, spiritually evacuated. And now, teetering on the verge of nervous disintegration, she felt infinitely calm… even a little sleepy.
The real, the unreal; the important, the insignificant; the Now, the Then; the cool of her arcade, the rippling heat of the empty public square; these voices chanting in Europe’s most ancient language… it was all indifferently tangled. It was all happening to someone else, someone for whom she felt great pity and sympathy, but whom she could not help. Someone past help.
After the massacre in Rome International, she had somehow got all the way from Italy to this café in a Basque market town. Dazed and mentally staggering, she had traveled fifteen hundred kilometers in nine hours. But now, with only another four or five kilometers to go, she had used up the last of her nervous energy. Her adrenaline well was empty, and it appeared that she was going to be defeated at the last moment by the caprice of a bumbling café owner.
First there had been terror and confusion at seeing her comrades shot down, neurasthenic incredulity during which she stood frozen as people rushed past her, knocking against her. More gunshots. Loud wailing from the family of Italians who had been awaiting a relative. Then panic clutched her; she walked blindly ahead, toward the main entrance of the terminal, toward the sunlight. She was breathing orally, shallow pants. Policemen rushed past her. She told herself to keep walking. Then she realized that the muscles in the small of her back were knotted painfully in anticipation of the bullet that never came. She passed an old man with a white goatee, sitting on the floor with his legs straight out before him, like a child at play. She could see no wound, but the pool of dark blood in which he sat was growing slowly wider. He did not seem to be in pain. He looked up at her interrogatively. She couldn’t make herself stop. Their eyes locked together as she walked by. She muttered stupidly, “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
A fat woman in the group of waiting relatives was hysterical, wailing and choking. More attention was being paid to her than to the fallen members of the family. She was, after all, Mama.
Over the confusion, the running and shouting, a calm, singsong voice announced the first call for passengers on Air France flight 470 for Toulouse, Tarbes, and Pau. The recorded voice was ignorant of the chaos beneath its loudspeakers. When the announcement was repeated in French, the last fragment stuck to Hannah’s consciousness. Gate Eleven. Gate Eleven.
The stewardess reminded Hannah to put up her seat back. “Yes. Yes. I’m sorry.” A minute later, on her return down the aisle, the hostess reminded her to buckle her seat belt. “What? Oh, yes. I’m sorry.”
The plane rose into thin cloud, then into crisp infinite blue. The drone of engines; the vibration of the fuselage. Hannah shivered with vulnerability and aloneness. There was a middle-aged man seated beside her, reading a magazine. From time to time his eyes slipped over the top of the page and glanced quickly at her suntanned legs below the khaki shorts. She could feel his eyes on her, and she buttoned one of the top two buttons of her shirt. The man smiled and cleared his throat. He was going to speak to her! The stupid son of a bitch was going to try to pick her up! My God!
And suddenly she was sick.
She made it to the toilet, where she knelt in the cramped space and vomited into the bowl. When she emerged, pale and fragile, the imprint of floor tile on her knees, the stewardess was solicitous but slightly superior, imagining that a short flight like this had made her airsick.
The plane banked on its approach to Pau, and Hannah looked out the window at the panorama of the Pyrenees, snow-tipped and sharp in the crystalline air, like a sea of whitecaps frozen in midstorm. Beautiful and awful.
Somewhere there, at the Basque end of the range, Nicholai Hel lived. If she could only get to Mr. Hel…
It was not until she was out of the terminal and standing in the chill sunlight of the Pyrenees that it occurred to her that she had no money. Avrim had carried all their money. She would have to hitchhike, and she didn’t know the route. Well, she could ask the drivers. She knew that she would have no trouble getting rides. When you’re pretty and young… and big-busted…
Her first ride took her into Pau, and the driver offered to find her a place to stay for the night. Instead, she talked him into taking her to the outskirts and directing her to Tardets. It must have been a hard car to shift, because his hand twice slipped off the lever and brushed her leg.
She got her next ride almost immediately. No, he wasn’t going to Tardets. Only as far as Oléron. But he could find her a place to stay for the night…
One more car, one more suggestive driver, and Hannah reached the little village of Tardets, where she sought further directions at the café. The first barrier she met was the local accent, langue d’oc with heavy overlays of Soultine Basque in which une petite cuillè has eight syllables.
“What are you looking for?” the café owner asked, his eyes leaving her breasts only to stray to her legs.
“I’m trying to find the Château of Etchebar. The house of M. Nicholai Hel.”
The proprietor frowned, squinted at the arches overhead, and scratched with one finger under the beret that Basque men take off only in bed, in coffin, or when adjudicating the game of rebot. No, he did not believe he had ever heard the name. Hel, you say? (He could pronounce the h because it is a Basque sound.) Perhaps his wife knew. He would ask. Would the Mademoiselle take something while she waited? She ordered coffee which came, thick, bitter, and often reheated, in a tin pot half the weight of which was tinker’s solder, but which leaked nevertheless. The proprietor seemed to regret the leak, but to accept it with heavy fatalism. He hoped the coffee that dripped on her leg had not burned her. It was not hot enough to burn? Good. Good. He disappeared into the back of the café, ostensibly to inquire after M. Hel.
And that had been fifteen minutes ago.
Hannah’s eyes dilated painfully as she looked out toward the bright square, deserted save for a litter of cars, mostly Deu’ches bearing ‘64 plates, parked at random angles, wherever their peasant drivers had managed to stop them.
With deafening roar of motor, grinding of gears, and outspewing of filthy exhaust, a German juggernaut lorry painfully navigated the corner with not ten centimeters to spare between vehicle and the crepi facades of the buildings. Sweating, cranking the wheel, and hiss-popping his air brakes, the German driver managed to introduce the monster into the ancient square, only to be met by the most formidable of barriers. Waddling side by side down the middle of the street, two Basque women with blank, coarse faces exchanged gossip out of the corners of their mouths. Middle-aged, dour, and vast, they plodded along on great barrel legs, indifferent to the frustration and fury of the truck driver, who crawled behind them muttering earnest imprecations and beating his fist against the steering wheel.
Hannah Stern had no way to appreciate this scene’s iconographic representation of Franco-German relations in the Common Market, and at this moment the café owner reappeared, his triangular Basque face abeam with sudden comprehension.
“You are seeking M. Hel!” he told her.
“That’s what I said.”
“Ah, if I had known it was M. Hel you were seeking…” He shrugged from the waist, lifting his palms in a gesture implying that a little more clarity on her part would have saved them both a lot of trouble.
He then gave her directions to the Château d’Etchebar: first cross the gave from Tardets (the r rolled, both the t and the s pronounced), then pass through the village of Abense-de-Haut (five syllables, the h and t both pronounced) and on up through Lichans (no nasal, s pronounced), then take the right forking up into the hills of Etchebar; but not the left forking, which would carry you to Licq.
“Is it far?”
“No, not all that far. But you don’t want to go to Licq, anyway.”
“I mean to Etchebar! Is it far to Etchebar!” In her fatigue and nervous tension, the formidable task of getting simple information out of a Basque was becoming too much for Hannah.
“No, not far. Maybe two kilometers after Lichans.”
“And how far is it to Lichans?”
He shrugged. “Oh, it could be two kilometers after Abense-de-Haut. You can’t miss it. Unless you turn left at the forking. Then you’ll miss it all right! You’ll miss it because you’ll be in Licq, don’t you see.”
The old mousse players had forsaken their game and were gathered behind the café owner, intrigued by all the confusion this foreign tourist was causing. They held a brief discussion in Basque, agreeing at last that if the girl took the left forking she would indeed end up in Licq. But then, Licq was not such a bad village. Was there not the famous story of the bridge at Licq built with the help of the Little People from the mountains who then…
“Listen!” Hannah pled. “Is there someone who could drive me to the Château of Etchebar?”
A quick conference was held between the café owner and the mousse players. There was some argument and a considerable amount of clarification and restatement of positions. Then the proprietor delivered the consensus opinion.
“No.”
It had been decided that this foreign girl wearing walking shorts and who had a rucksack was one of the young athletic tourists who were notorious for being friendly, but for tipping very little. Therefore, there was no one who would drive her to Etchebar, except for the oldest of the mousse players, who was willing to gamble on her generosity, but sadly he had no car. And anyway, he did not know how to drive.
With a sigh, Hannah took up her rucksack. But when the café owner reminded her of the cup of coffee, she remembered she had no French money. She explained this with expressions of lighthearted contrition, trying to laugh off the ludicrousness of the situation. But he steadfastly stared at the cup of unpaid-for coffee, and remained dolefully silent. The mousse players discussed this new turn of events with animation. What? The tourist took coffee without the money to pay for it? It was not impossible that this was a matter for the law.
Finally, the proprietor sighed a rippling sigh and looked up at her, tragedy in his moist eyes. Was she really telling him that she didn’t have two francs for the coffee—forget the tip—just two francs for the coffee? There was a matter of principle involved here. After all, he paid for his coffee; he paid for the gas to heat the water; and every couple of years he paid the tinker to mend the pot. He was a man who paid his debts. Unlike some others he could mention.
Hannah was between anger and laughter. She could not believe that all these heavy theatrics were being produced for two francs. (She did not know that the price of a cup of coffee was, in fact, one franc.) She had never before met that especially French version of avarice in which money—the coin itself—is the center of all consideration, more important than goods, comfort, dignity. Indeed, more important than real wealth. She had no way to know that, although they bore Basque names, these village people had become thoroughly French under the corrosive cultural pressures of radio, television, and state-controlled education, in which modern history is creatively interpreted to confect that national analgesic, la vérité à la Cinquième République.
Dominated by the mentality of the petit commercant, these village Basques shared the Gallic view of gain in which the pleasure of earning a hundred francs is nothing beside the intense suffering caused by the loss of a centime.
Finally realizing that his dumb show of pain and disappointment was not going to extract the two francs from this young girl, the proprietor excused himself with sardonic politeness, telling her be would be right back.
When he returned twenty minutes later, after a tense conference with his wife in the back room, he asked, “You are a friend of M. Hel?”
“Yes,” Hannah lied, not wanting to go into all that.
“I see. Well then, I shall assume that Mr. Hel will pay, should you fail to.” He tore a sheet from the note pad provided by the Byrrh distributors and wrote something on it before folding it two times, sharpening the creases with his thumbnail. “Please give this to M. Hell,” he said coldly.
His eyes no longer flicked to her breast and legs. Some things are more important than romance.
* * *
Hannah had been walking for more than an hour, over the Pont d’Abense and the glittering Gave de Saison, then slowly up into the Basque hills along a narrow tar road softened by the sun and confined by ancient stone walls over which lizards scurried at her approach. In the fields sheep grazed, lambs teetering beside the ewes, and russet vaches de pyrénées loitered in the shade of unkempt apple trees, watching her pass, their eyes infinitely gentle, infinitely stupid. Round hills lush with fern contained and comforted the narrow valley, and beyond the saddles of the hills rose the snow-tipped mountains, their jagged arêtes sharply traced on the taut blue sky. High above, a hawk balanced on the rim of an updraft, its wing feathers splayed like fingers constantly feeling the wind as it scanned the ground for prey.
The heat stewed a heady medley of aroma: the soprano of wild-flower, the mezzotones of cut grass and fresh sheep droppings, the insistent basso profundo of softened tar.
Insulated by fatigue from the sights and smells around her, Hannah plodded along, her head down and her concentration absorbed in watching the toes of her hiking boots. Her mind, recoiling from the sensory overload of the last ten hours, was finding haven in a tunnel-vision of the consciousness. She did not dare to think, to imagine, to remember; because looming out there, just beyond the edges of here-and-now, were visions that would damage her, if she let them in. Don’t think. Just walk, and watch the toes of your boots. It is all about getting to the Château d’Etchebar. It is all about contacting Nicholai Hel. There is nothing before or beyond that.
She came to a forking in the road and stopped. To the right, the way rose steeply toward the hilltop village of Etchebar, and beyond the huddle of stone and crepi houses she could see the wide mansard facade of what must be the château peeking between tall pine trees and surrounded by a high stone wall.
She sighed deeply and trudged on, her fatigue blending with protective emotional neurasthenia. If she could just make the château… just get to Nicholai Hel…
Two peasant women in black dresses paused in their gossip over a low stone wall and watched the outlander girl with open curiosity and mistrust. Where was she going, this hussy showing her legs? Toward the château? Ah well, that explained it. All sorts of strange people go to the château ever since that foreigner bought it! Not that M. Hel was a bad man. Indeed, their husbands had told them he was much admired by the Basque freedom movement. But still… he was a newcomer. No use denying it. He had lived in the château only fourteen years, while everyone else in the village (ninety-three souls) could find his name on dozens of gravestones around the church, sometimes newly cut into pyrenean granite, sometimes barely legible on ancient stone scrubbed smooth by five centuries of rain and wind. Look! The hussy has not even bound her breasts! She wants men to look at her, that’s what it is! She will have a nameless child if she is not careful! Who would marry her then? She will end up cutting vegetables and scrubbing floors in the household of her sister. And her sister’s husband will pester her when he is drunk! And one day, when the sister is too far along with child to be able to do it, this one will succumb to the husband! Probably in the barn. It always happens so. And the sister will find out, and she will drive this one from the house! Where will she go then? She will become a whore in Bayonne, that’s what!
A third woman joined the two. Who is that girl showing her legs? We know nothing about her—except that she is a whore from Bayonne. And not even Basque! Do you think she might be a Protestant? Oh no, I wouldn’t go that far. Just a poor putain who has slept with the husband of her sister. It is what always happens, if you go about with your breasts unbound.
True, true.
As she passed, Hannah looked up and noticed the three women. “Bonjour, mesdames,” she said.
“Bonjour, mademoiselle,” they chanted together, smiling in the open Basque way. “You are giving yourself a walk?” one asked.
“Yes, Madame.”
“That’s nice. You are lucky to have the leisure.”
An elbow nudged, and was nudged back. It was daring and clever to come so close to saying it.
“You are looking for the château, Mademoiselle?”
“Yes, I am.”
“Just keep going as you are, and you will find what you’re looking for.”
A nudge; another nudge. It was dangerous, but deliciously witty, to come so close to saying it.
Hannah stood before the heavy iron gates. There was no one in sight, and there did not seem to be any way of ringing or knocking. The château was set back a hundred meters, up a long curving allée of trees. Uncertain, she decided to try one of the smaller gates down the road, when a voice behind her asked in a singsong, “Mademoiselle?”
She returned to the gate where an old gardener in blue working apron was peering out from the other side of the barrier. “I am looking for M. Hel,” she explained.
“Yes,” the gardener said, with that inhaled “oui” that can mean almost anything, except yes. He told her to wait there, and he disappeared into the curving row of trees. A minute later she heard the hinges creak on one of the side gates, and he beckoned her with a rolling arm and a deep bow that almost cost him his balance. As she passed him, she realized that he was half-drunk. In fact, Pierre was never drunk. Also, he was never sober. The regular spacing of his daily twelve glasses of red protected him from either of those excesses.
Pierre pointed the way, but did not accompany her to the house; he returned to trimming the box hedges that formed a labyrinth. He never worked in haste, and he never avoided work, his day punctuated, refreshed, and blurred by his glass of red every half hour or so.
Hannah could hear the clip-clip-clip of his shears, the sound receding as she walked up the allée between tall blue-green cedars, the drooping branches of which wept and undulated, brushing the shadows with long kelplike sweeps. A susurrant wind hissed high in the trees like tide over sand, and the dense shade was chill. She shivered. She was dizzy after the long hot walk, having taken nothing but coffee all day long. Her emotions had been frozen by fear, then melted by despair. Frozen, then melted. Her hold on reality was slipping.
When she reached the foot of a double rank of marble steps ascending to the terraces, she stopped, uncertain which way to go.
“May I help you?” a woman’s voice asked from above.
Hannah shaded her eyes and looked up toward the sunny terrace. “Hello. I am Hannah Stern.”
“Well, come up, Hannah Stern.” With the sunlight behind the woman, Hannah could not see her features, but from her dress and manner she seemed to be Oriental, although her voice, soft and modulated, belied the twittering stereotype of feminine Oriental speech. “We have one of those coincidences that are supposed to bring luck. My name is Hana—almost the same as yours. In Japanese, hana means flower. What does your Hannah mean? Perhaps, like so many Western names, it means nothing. How delightful of you to come just in time for tea.”
They shook hands in the French fashion, and Hannah was struck by the calm beauty of this woman, whose eyes seemed to regard her with a mixture of kindness and humor, and whose manner made Hannah feel oddly protected and at ease. As they walked together across the broad flagstone terrace toward the house with its classic facade of four porte-fenêtres flanking the main entrance, the woman selected the best bloom from the flowers she had been cutting and offered it to Hannah with a gesture as natural as it was pleasant. “I must put these in water,” she said. “Then we shall take our tea. You are a friend of Nicholai?”
“No, not really. My uncle was a friend of his.”
“And you are looking him up in passing. How thoughtful of you.” She opened the glass doors to a sunny reception room in the middle of which tea things were laid out on a low table before a marble fireplace with a brass screen. A door on the other side of the room clicked closed just as they entered. During the few days she was to spend at the Château d’Etchebar, all Hannah would ever see or hear of staff and servants would be doors that closed as she entered, or soft tiptoeing at the end of the hall, or the appearance of coffee or flowers on a bedside table. Meals were prepared in such a way that the mistress of the house could do the serving herself. It was an opportunity for her to show kindness and concern.
“Just leave your rucksack there in the corner, Hannah,” the woman said. “And would you be so good as to pour, while I arrange these flowers?”
With sunlight flooding in through the French windows, walls of light blue, moldings of gold leaf, furniture blending Louis XV and oriental inlays, threads of gray vapor twisting up from the teapot through a shaft of sunlight, mirrors everywhere lightening, reflecting, doubling and tripling everything; this room was not in the same world as that in which young men are shot down in airports. As she poured from a silver teapot into Limoges with a vaguely Chinese feeling, Hannah was overwhelmed by reality vertigo. Too much had happened in these last hours. She was afraid she was going to faint.
For no reason, she remembered feelings of dislocation like this when she was a child in school… it was summer, and she was bored, and there was the drone of study all around her. She had stared until objects became big/little. And she had asked herself, “Am I me? Am I here? Is this really me thinking these thoughts? Me? Me?”
And now, as she watched the graceful, economical movements of this slender Oriental woman stepping back to criticize the flower arrangement, then making a slight correction, Hannah tried desperately to find anchorage against the tide of confusion and fatigue that was tugging her away.
That’s odd, she thought. Of all that had happened that day: the horrible things in the airport, the dreamlike flight to Pau, the babbling suggestive talk of the drivers she had gotten rides from, that fool of a café-owner in Tardets, the long walk up the shimmering road to Etchebar… of all of it, the most profound image was her walk up the cedar-lined allée in subaqueous shadow… shivering in the dense shadow as the wind made sea sounds in the trees. It was another world. And odd.