by Russ Rymer
Maybe they’d been to the park. Now, surely, they were headed home. In retreat they didn’t display the neat tripartite experiment in perception that had been their distinction before, with one of them oblivious to where he was, one hyperaware of it but only in terms of her task, and the last oblivious to nothing whatsoever and keenly aware of all. Now they seemed unified in weariness. The father carried the scooter, and the daughter carried the cat.
She lugged it like a stuffed toy, her arm garroting its chest, its forelegs stuck out straight ahead like a sleepwalker in a horror flick, its little pink tongue stuck out a little too, its back legs bouncing loose against her leg—dangled this way, the cat was nearly as long as the child. It didn’t seem to object to this rude transport, though as they passed me I discerned a wacko tolerance in its expression, and immediately I retrieved something I’d thought was lost for good, the recollection I had chased around my skull in the middle of the previous night. Sahran had said . . . Sahran had said . . .
Sahran had said “a tragedy survived.” But then later, turning down the museum hallway away from the painting and away from his thoughts of storms and forests and missing ring fingers and folded umbrellas and the woman who had managed to get through the worst and had only good to look forward to, he’d said something else that I’ve neglected to report to you. Sahran had said, “Or maybe not.”
XII
“IT’S ALL ABOUT THE CAT, isn’t it?”
“What’s that mean?” Sahran said.
“The cat in the painting,” I said.
He waited.
“Yours didn’t have one.”
We were strolling under the trees along the Quai d’Anjou, fresh from a lovely dim restaurant, looking out across the river from Île Saint-Louis, indulging in the rarity of a clear-skied twilight that looked more wintry than the standard rainy evening. With the overcast dispelled, winter had lost its veil, and an arctic iciness crazed the wide heavens like frost across a windowpane. I envied the sky. Involuntarily (or maybe not), I was shedding my cover, but with no gain of clarity. The meal had been sumptuous, from foie gras to île flottant, and the conversation as seductive as I would allow myself to allow. I rattled on about the Église d’Hiver without putting a name (Corie Bingham) to the quest that had brought me there, and I brought up my other new friends without giving any more than their names. “You have your diplomatic ways,” I prodded Sahran, one diplomat to another. “How would I go about getting in touch with a guy named Carlos Landers? He isn’t in the phone book.” Sahran jotted the spelling down on a little notepad and then slipped it back in his pocket and didn’t ask me why. “And also a guy named Byron Saxe,” I added, why not. “Middle initial M.”
Throughout the meal, and with each step down the quai, I could feel my Sahran surveillance mission slipping from its original intent. Was that the source of my irritation? Despite the evening’s pleasures, I was edgy as a horsefly. Later I would see how deep my tension ran, how angrily I resisted the thing I was drifting into. I was like a teenager, equal parts tantrum and temptation, unable to keep the heat of attraction from igniting my animosity. That was part of it. The rest was pure expectancy (and no less adolescent). I’d come up with this little insight about the cat and hoarded it till the moment I could present it to Sahran as a gift, a token. Which now, as we walked, I did.
“See, it’s no wonder that you’re such a conflicted optimist,” I said, for I’d decided that that’s what he was. “You grew up with a vision of life in which the future was unobstructed and the road was clear. But then one day you go to the museum and you see the real painting and discover that this strange little cat has rolled a ball of yarn across the path. Two steps ahead.”
“And now I’m no longer so sure.”
“Exactly: Is the string an amusement or a snare?” I said. “A plaything or a trap? A lure or a warning? Has the artist painted a history of survival? Or a forecast of a tragedy?”
“Huh,” Sahran said, pausing to face me. Then he turned away and strolled on. Was that to be my reward? A pat on the head? Well, it hadn’t been much of an insight, truth to tell, but he might at least have gone through the motions of admiring it. I felt my testiness spike. And, oh, how adolescent all my griping felt! But even as I instructed myself, Get over it, another voice yelled, See? And my suspicions added, Such a kulak! Of course he’d take whatever heart he wanted.
“About this rally,” Sahran said, slipping past my subject and into one of his own, to my increased annoyance. Though here, even I had to admit, my pettiness was getting grandiose, since the subject he wanted to talk about was me. “What happened? You had a flyer; you went to the church.”
“It was a mess, complete chaos,” I said, but I’d said it already—I’d brought up the mobilization at table. Now, alfresco, I didn’t want to discuss it.
“I’m sure it was extremely organized,” he said.
“Oh, so you were there!” I exclaimed with mock surprise, intent on being intolerable. “I missed you!”
“No,” he answered earnestly. (Hopeless!) “I was not.” We reached a corner and turned away from the Seine and onto a narrow street of blank, high, garden walls and house façades sheer to the sidewalk. Sahran held my elbow as we crossed the cobblestones and kept it when we’d made it to the other curb. “But this is France,” he said, “where we choreograph our chaos. Disaster’s a ballet. Even our sex is stylish. Ask any Frenchman. Even our bad sex. Have you gone to a big manifestation?”
“Well, at the church,” I said.
“Go to a big one sometime. You’ll be interested. Much, much more tense than American demonstrations, it’s a particularly French sort of violence. It’s something you just can’t find in the States, you don’t have the streets for it. But always, like a hurricane—at the center of the fury there’s a quiet core. In the middle of even the worst Paris protest is a huddle filled with calm negotiation. Really, I promise you, ten or a dozen strongmen from opposing sides, placing their bets, making their moves.”
“I see you know all about this,” I said, hearing in my head his sister’s voice: You always want to pretend to know everything.
“I guess I ought to,” he said, wise enough to ignore the provocation, and he said he’d lived in the city a long time. “If twelve Parisian strongmen are negotiating anything, I’m sure I know at least six of them.”
Before I could even think, La-di-da, I heard him think, Don’t la-di-da me. Fine, then. I was clearly in the mood for a fight.
“Let’s say five,” Sahran said. “To be on the safe side. Did you like what they said?”
“Who?”
“The speakers, the protesters.”
“How could I not?” I declared, foursquare in defense of everything I’d derided at the time. How foolish I would have looked to myself (wasn’t war his subject, after all? Wasn’t the Middle East his region?) if I’d bothered to look at myself (but hadn’t war been my subject too?). “Nothing good comes of bloodshed, that’s all they’re saying. Of course I agree. Don’t you?”
“Hmm,” Sahran said. “What happened to ‘grace comes somehow violent’?”
With our turn into the side street we’d traded our oceanic vistas for a canyon horizon, and the arctic ice ran like a river overhead. We paused before a row house whose handsome eighteenth-century stone façade was hung with a sign announcing CENTURY 21 and SALE PENDING. “That’s just Aeschylus,” I said, preachy. “This is a war. An actual war, not some stage war, and it’s about to happen. And it will be horrible. It’s quite a serious matter.” I couldn’t quell the childish thought that Corie would be proud of me.
“You astonish me,” Sahran said, and for a moment I could glow with the pleasure that somehow I’d caught him off-guard even though I was in his territory. It was to be a momentary moment.
Sahran said, “Because, you know, you do heart transplants. For your purposes, without bloodshed there can be no good at all. You’re in the only legitimate line of work in the world where the corre
lation is one to one: someone can’t live unless somebody else is killed.”
It was my turn to stop and I did, but I didn’t turn, just stopped dead in my tracks as though the sentence were a barrier dropped across the sidewalk and I wasn’t sure how to step over it. I could feel my temperature plummeting. “I see,” I said when I’d gathered the full force of his meaning. “Emil. So this isn’t just a casual conversation we’re having, is it?”
“Come in,” he said.
We were standing in front of his home.
I’d spent the broad expanse of the day, between breakfast with Corie and my dinner date with Sahran, at Saxe’s home—my home— romancing a file box full of letters. I’d skimmed the one just hot off Corie’s press, then decided I’d come back to it and cracked open the archive to begin at the beginning, which, since the early letters weren’t so reticent about their time and location, I learned was in Bilbao, in May of 1931, a year when spring came late but strong and the fuchsias in the Etxebarría had blooms as big as butterflies. Unlike the earlier letters I’d read, each of the translations in the box that Corie’d handed me was accompanied by its original, tidily paper-clipped together with the corresponding envelope if there was one, though the stationery of choice, especially early on, was a blue airmail onionskin that folded up to form its own envelope. The contents documented a woman in the delirium of young love and a new marriage, and then, after several years of adventurous and unceasing honeymoon—and before I had to lay the reading down to get gussied up for my evening—a desperate separation brought on by a war in which they both enlisted, he in Paris managing the underground railway funneling foreign volunteers and supplies through France and across the Pyrenees into Republican Spain, and she in the actual fighting, as a nurse in a blood wagon and in field hospitals, in battle and behind the front.
As I read, I resisted a gentle but unrelenting hallucination, fought it like an undertow. It was evident, of course, that the papers I held were translations, that behind each page were two pairs of hands, wielding separate pens. I’d understood that ever since I’d read the second letter and long before Corie’s explanations. Still and all, I couldn’t get the identity of the author separated from that of the interpreter, the woman living most of a century ago from the one living right now right next door. Onto every adventure and mishap and horror related by the Alba of 1937 and ’38 and ’39, I pasted the modern girl’s face. This was Corie’s doing!—so I grumbled. She was the one who’d conflated their identities, declared their equivalence from the pulpit of the Église d’Hiver (and how many other soapboxes?). Somehow her public affidavit had convinced me of their kinship, assured me their affinity was real. Only later would I grapple with the worse danger, that Corie might be convinced of this as well. For now, locked away in my solitude, an onionskin counterpane spread around me on the divan, sitting like a brown bird in a nest of blue petals, I tried to gather clues to one Alba’s nature by reading the other one’s letters. My hand burned; the letters were my salve.
Toward evening, I put them aside and went to get myself ready.
Sahran’s apartments excited that emotion that he always produced in me, radical ambivalence. I desired to stay; I was desperate to flee. His rooms were gracious, beautifully decorated and arranged, of course, but also, at the same time—perceptibly, invisibly—frayed by long habitation, by generations tracing out their lives and days within this shell until they’d worn it into their own comfortable and abiding shape, like the contour of a river boulder carved by a patient current. I wanted to sink into the lap of a velour armchair, to bask in the yellow warmth pooled beneath a table lamp and lose this infernal chill (and here came the ambivalence) that Sahran’s words had induced in me.
At least my adolescent quibbling was gone, purged by a tsunami of real anger over real things, anger and fear. But even here the tables had been turned, for the issue Sahran had raised—and he’d raised it like a cudgel—concerned the very surgery I wished to interrogate him about. The turnaround caught me off-guard, to say the least.
Once off the street, I went inert. I was cryogenically suspended. Sahran propped me upright in the living room like an umbrella in an umbrella stand while he closeted our coats. He came back and half invited, half pushed me into one of the armchairs, then went over to a cabinet, returned with two glasses of red liquor, and pressed one into my hand.
“Just guessing,” he said. “There’s ice if you want some.”
“Christ, no,” I told him. “But thanks.” I wanted it to boil like a witch’s brew. I took a swallow, noted with surprise that it was bourbon, and waited for the glow to blossom, and when I felt sufficiently thawed to give it a try, I said, “Not killed, Emil. For someone who needs a heart to live, someone else must donate a heart. The person dies, that’s true. Of another cause. No one is killed.”
He had walked over to stare out a window, his back to me. “When?” he said.
“When what?”
“Does he die?”
“Technically? When his heart stops.”
“And what stops his heart?”
I saw where this was going, but could think of no reason to draw the drama out.
“Potassium chloride,” I said. “If it doesn’t stop on its own.”
“And ice,” Emil said. “Don’t forget that you pack the heart in ice.”
“Not me, Emil, please. But okay, I take your point, the surgeon. A surgeon packs the heart. But the donor is legally brain-dead before the operation. His heart is still going, but he’s not.”
“Why put him under, if he’s so dead? For the hell of it? You want to be sure he isn’t awake while he’s dead?”
“Emil, what are you doing? Everything you’re asking, you know already.”
“But you do anesthetize him, right? This corpse. Before you remove his heart.”
“That’s the procedure. It’s a way of keeping organs alive, regulating blood pressure, that sort of thing. Minimizing pain too, but his pain’s all in his spine at that point.”
“His pain,” Emil said. “You know, it occurs to me that only two parties in history have been legally empowered to split open a human chest and cut out a beating heart. An Aztec priest. And you.” He turned from the window. “But for some reason that I can’t understand, you get to consider me a monster.”
So that was it . . . so he hadn’t been oblivious. And I saw of an instant that he felt the same push-pull, terrified attraction that I did. I stood from the chair. I wanted to go straight to him. Instead, I walked to the liquor cabinet. “It’s an appropriate question,” I said carefully. “Except I think that you have it turned around.” Carefully, I picked up the decanter from the cabinet top. Should I go ahead and spew the whole history? Well, part of it, maybe. And if spewing required a little sustenance? I gave the decanter a tilt. “Do you know the name Luckner Cambronne?” I asked.
I allowed him time to say, and when he didn’t, I went on. “You see, I’ve never cut anything out of anyone,” I said. “But one thing I’m in charge of is a patient’s blood supply. I’ve given a lot of patients a lot of blood over the years and because of that and because I practice in the United States of America, a lot of that blood has come from Port-au-Prince. Until recently, when AIDS came along, Haitian blood was widely used, for the simple reason that it was cheap and plentiful, owing to a reliable supplier: Cambronne.”
Luckner Cambronne, I explained, “or, as he was known, the ‘Caribbean Vampire,’” was a pillar of American medicine, though he wasn’t a doctor. He was a bank teller who rose to be a lieutenant of Papa Doc Duvalier, heading up the dictator’s Tontons Macoute terrorist militias and, not incidentally, a lucrative international blood concession. Lucrative for Cambronne because he could pay peasants almost nothing for their plasma. The problem was, many peasants he didn’t pay at all. The successful merging of terrorism with medical supply brought marvelous efficiencies. There were never any problems with shortages. An ample flow was guaranteed. Cambronne also provided American me
dical schools with Haitian cadavers, hundreds of stiffs, the sources of which might never have been questioned if he hadn’t also initiated a sideline supplying Haitian steaks to restaurants.
“Do you see what I’m getting at?” I asked. I’d never “killed” one of his precious heart donors, I said, had never anesthetized a donor, “never taken part in a harvest, but I can tell you with near certainty that I have had a role in the traffic of murdered men . . . So now it’s your turn: answer me. Do you find me a monster?”
I had paced around the premises while I recited my history lesson, around couches and around chairs and around end tables and coffee tables, and my tour of Sahran’s room brought me finally around to Sahran. We stood face to face, some paces apart, duelers at the end of the count. I said, quietly, “And then tell me why the hell not.”
He was silent and I was. I had hoped that the combined effects of venting my emotions and dousing my sobriety would ease my agitation, but the more I’d talked, the angrier I’d become.
“Okay,” I said finally, “then I’ll tell you,” and I said that the only reason I hadn’t been a monster back then was that back then I hadn’t known that such things went on. “But I don’t have that excuse anymore. I am on cosmic parole. It’s no longer adequate for me to say I didn’t know where this came from. I have to be sure. And one day, maybe in a week or two, I will help switch out one human heart for another, and when I do, you have to tell me, Emil, will I be a monster?”
“No,” Sahran said, softly but with a panicked urgency. He set his glass down in such a hurry the liquor sloshed onto the tabletop, and he stepped toward me.