The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  “Anyway, if you had known him,” she said, “you would have seen it, the sadness. You would have felt that something was off, that there was a sickness, that he knew—” She stopped.

  “That he knew what he had done?”

  “He knew one day it had to end. That made him vigilant. To keep it…” She paused again.

  “To keep the lie hidden.”

  “No, not that, not that at all,” she insisted with vehemence. “He just wanted to hold on to it while he could. That was the sadness in him. Because he knew he couldn’t hold on to it forever.”

  “To hold on to you.”

  “To— Yes, no, you are right: to me,” she said, as though she had never thought of it that way. “I was his reprieve, right? As his child, I was a reminder of the past—its embodiment, even, in the most literal way. He knew that one day there would have to be a reckoning. But I was his daughter, and that meant that the reckoning had to wait. He had to see me grown, to send me off. So as his child I represented…” She hesitated. “I was his crime, but at the same time, I was his reprieve.”

  “I see it,” said Spurlock. “I see it now.”

  “Whatever his correspondent told him,” she went on, “David knew already. It wasn’t news. It was what he’d known all along.”

  Spurlock said nothing.

  She continued: “Even last night, as I was reading it, I was convinced—at least, I tried to convince myself—that he’d just made it all up. I mean, he’d already made up my past, he’d made up all the whole elaborate story of how Miriam was my mother. Surely then he could have made up the story of the letters too, the postal box, the photographs, the correspondent. Page after page, I told myself that was what he’d done.”

  “Is it possible?” Hope surged up in Spurlock. The possibility that Oppen could have invented it all flared with the vividness of a hallucination. “Could he have done that? Could he have made them up, the letters, the photographs?”

  “No—I mean, maybe I would have believed it, maybe I would have convinced myself, if it wasn’t for the other letter you brought.”

  The other letter: Spurlock had been so preoccupied with whether to give her Oppen’s confession that he had forgotten about the other letter, the one in the blue airmail envelope.

  “What did it say?” he asked.

  For several seconds she said nothing. Finally, she took the envelope from the pocket of her jeans. She tore open the flap, withdrew a sheaf of light pages, and began to read.

  Mon cher enfant—

  Why had he not considered that it would be in French? He remembered the day, years earlier, when she had appeared in the church and unfolded that first sheet of paper, the sheet on which he had seen his own name caught in the snare of a language he had never spoken.

  “I’ll translate as I go along,” she said.

  “ ‘My dear child,’ ” she began.

  I would spare you the story, but it is not fair that you remain uninformed, and I am a fair man. Do your hands tremble, holding these pages sent to you by a stranger? You see how mine tremble too, writing these words, and not only because I am an old man. I can feel how death grows impatient of my dawdling. You will understand how strange it is for me to address you in this manner, strange because you are in fact no stranger to me. After all, dear child, I have known you since the day you were born.

  * * *

  —

  I say death grows impatient of my dawdling. Perhaps I am the impatient one. I have never feared death; indeed, he has been my faithful companion. He was my playmate, looking with me through the magnifying glass at the ants I burned up in the sun. He crouched with me beside the first hare I shot as the last flutter of life departed the small body. He was my steadfast comrade in the Algerian war, where I served in the Signal Corps. There we were inseparable, and he never faltered, never rested.

  But then he took my young wife, the mother of my only child, and next, as though this too were his right, my daughter too, my Miriam.

  You see, child, how age has taken from me any scruple for what I say.

  You never knew her, my Miriam. She drowned before you were born. It was as though death were jealous that I should presume to make a life for myself, for my little family, enraged that after the obscenity of Algeria I should clothe myself in respectability as Maître Levaux, solicitor, in the provincial city of Nevers. Me! Maître Levaux, who had been death’s agent and his entrepreneur, all through the battle for Algiers, or in the CRA at Constantine, who with the most rudimentary objects—a coil of wire, a bucket of water—could anticipate and satisfy his most extravagant desires. It was as though he was saying: I will not permit you to abandon me.

  I did not ask why he chose me. He loved me, I thought, because I loved justice, and I could not love justice without loving him as well. It was as though he said: I made you; you cannot leave me.

  “It is— He is Miriam’s father,” she said, looking at Spurlock in wonder before turning back to the pages.

  My daughter, Miriam, you never knew her.

  I kept asking her, is it someone, and she kept saying, it is everything. You are pregnant, I said, and she knew that I knew, but she said no, no, no, no one, it was impossible. I said it must be someone: you are carrying someone’s child. She said that I must stop, that one could not choose, that no one could choose who or what one loved.

  This of course proved that she had been alienated from her senses.

  Did he abandon you, I asked, and she said, everyone abandons everyone, and anyway it’s not anyone, it’s not anything, it is everything.

  For a moment then I thought it would be all right, that it was only one of her spells. She had always had spells. Her attempt to kill herself, she had said it was an error, an accident, that it could never happen again. She promised me it would never happen again. She said: I could not give it to you lightly, my word of honor. And I who have never believed anyone believed her, because she was my daughter. She embraced me and said she was sorry and asked would I forgive her? Would I promise? I said—and it was the last thing I ever said to her—there was nothing to forgive.

  Then she had gone. In two days they found me and gave me the news.

  * * *

  —

  I went immediately to Nevers. My inquiries there were brief and straightforward. Yes, said the shopkeeper at the hardware store in Nevers, the girl had come in and purchased a great length of chain. The police had inquired as well, and a tall Dutchman had come in too, not long after, looking for chain, just like the girl had. Maybe he had been English. Yes, he could have been American. He was drunk and had frightened her. In the end, all he had bought was a hammer and chisel.

  Others had seen him too, I discovered, in the place Carnot, on the rue Saint-Étienne. An American of his description had taken a tent site at the campground across the river, a notable fact, because the nights were still cold.

  Within days I had learned all there was to learn. The man was David Oppen, an American. It was not, as she had said, anyone or everything, but a specific person, an American, a man named David Oppen.

  David Oppen. I say the name now, and it is just as intolerable as it was a quarter century ago. But—I cannot deny it—that name was a gift to me. Though grief had thrown my life into disarray, a new purpose had driven out that darkness. I say new purpose, but in truth it was none other than my old beloved, justice and justice alone. Its light like a lantern flame had singled out the name of David Oppen and had fastened an indelible shadow to his heel.

  I became a foreigner, a sojourner in my hometown, pitching an old army tent on the other side of the campground, disguising myself as a tourist with camera and sunglasses, not so much to conceal myself from Oppen but against chance encounters with my own acquaintances. Dislodged from the groove of routine, how abruptly one vanishes….

&nbs
p; * * *

  —

  I’d affected the camera merely as a component of my disguise, but then it occurred to me that I could use it to take pictures. Soon each click of the shutter afforded me an instant of relief, a flash of hope that an explanation would be disclosed, a pattern revealed. This hope grew. As for David Oppen, he leant each night against the railing of the bridge, appeared daily at the shop where he bought his liquor, nodded on park benches like a derelict, but mostly walked and walked and walked.

  I might have understood that his grief was a cousin of my grief. I might have understood that he had lost a Miriam all his own. I might have, but I did not. For me there was one fact and one fact only: he was alive and Miriam was dead. Click went my camera, and the lens snapped up image after image, as though it had been starved. Knowledge or understanding could not satisfy this hunger. Only justice could: justice, I knew, was the sustenance of the gods.

  When I saw him outside the pharmacy, leaning over that drugged-out Gypsy girl in the bushes, helping her to her feet—when I saw that the girl was pregnant, that he was helping her home, I saw no Good Samaritan. No: what I saw was an opportunity, an opening. I neither knew nor understood what I saw, feeling only the first inkling of a conviction: justice had chosen me and would show me the way. If I held fast, in time I would be rewarded. What I was owed would be delivered into my hands.

  Hanging a block behind them, I followed them on their slow progress through the streets. I watched them disappear behind the plywood sheet propped over the entrance to an abandoned construction site out on the rue Saint-Saturnin. I returned to the campground to wait.

  I did not have to wait for long. That night, a young man appeared on a motorbike at the campground where David Oppen had rented a tent site, the campground in whose opposite corner I had pitched my own moth-eaten army tent. The young man was shouting: Where was he, the American doctor? For God’s sake, where was he?

  The American doctor? I said, emerging. You’ll find him in his campsite down by the water.

  After they had left the campground on the young man’s motorbike, I followed without haste, out to the unbuilt building on the rue Saint-Saturnin. In the shadows of the rue Saint-Saturnin, I waited.

  Abruptly, the boy on his motorbike burst from the mouth of the garage, skidding to a stop on the street, frozen in indecision. For a moment he rested his forehead on his handlebars. Then he lifted his head, and looking straight at me or through me, he planted his heel on the pavement, wrenched his bike around, and sped away in the direction of the ring-road and the autoroute.

  Nothing happened. The sky stayed black. I waited. The plywood board hung open on its hinge as though inviting me to pass through. I passed through.

  From the edge of the ramp I could peer down into the garage. They lay in the weak light of a candle or lantern. They did not move, neither the girl nor David Oppen, nor the little shape between them, or the dog at their feet. It was as though they had been carved on the lid of a tomb. I had to rest the camera on the railing: the shutter hung open for what seemed like seconds, soaking the film with that darkness. The shutter closed and the dog jerked. I fought back the urge to retreat from my post. I waited until I was satisfied I had escaped notice then slipped back out to the street.

  Shortly after daybreak he emerged, torso bare in the cold morning, in his arms a bundle wrapped in a bloody shirt. He veered out into the street, bellowing for help. Then police cars bumped up onto the curbs, their strobes reeling. At last the strobes faded, and I was just another of the gathered passersby, the frowning, shrugging citizens of Nevers.

  All day, from a chair in a waiting room in the Hôpital Colbert, I watched the nurses as they came and went. At last I approached one and explained how I happened to have been walking past when the man, the American, appeared in the street with the baby he had saved. Could she reassure me that the little one would be all right? No, no, I said, I did not need to visit! If she could just reassure me. Oh yes, she was happy to assure me how lucky the girl had been, how lucky that the American doctor had appeared, that she had been rescued from that basement from those filthy Gypsy kids. And had I heard? Why, the American doctor had arranged for the baby’s transfer to Paris, to the Necker Pediatric Hospital, at his own expense. Was that so? Yes, it was so, and to the Hôpital Necker, no less!

  In Paris, I took a room in a veterans’ pension and joined the cadre of Necker volunteers. I assisted parents in their distress, accompanied them in their vigils, sat with them in their grief, all the while watching out for the bent silhouette of the American doctor in the waiting rooms. He was no longer intoxicated but alert, not reading, not watching the whispering televisions mounted on the walls. He merely stared at the floor as though waiting for it to open up. Nine weeks you were there, my child, until you were transferred to the Maison Nôtre Dame. It was from one of the nuns at the Maison that I learned the American doctor had filed for your adoption.

  One day when you, my child, have a child of your own, you will learn what otherwise cannot be taught: that this tiny stranger was fated to appear here, to take its place in this world. This I learned staring at my daughter, Miriam, when she nursed in my wife’s arms. She was frighteningly small, born almost two months early. How precarious she seemed, and yet she too had steered her way through all time to be here.

  * * *

  —

  After he took you from the Maison Nôtre Dame, after he brought you to America, to New York, it took me a full year to catch up with him. During that year I traveled first to Canada, much easier to immigrate to than the States. In Québec I met some Basque shepherds from the Ossau Valley in the French Pyrénées, on their way back to ranches in Alberta. Their village in France would have been less than a day’s drive from Nevers, but their dialect was incomprehensible to me. They were by nature suspicious of any non-Basque Frenchman, but in the end I earned their trust. They had cousins working in Wyoming, and so to Wyoming I went on a shepherding visa. Back then, such a thing was possible, encouraged even, and the pay was good. By the end of the second lambing season, I had learned a little English, a little Basque, even a little Spanish from the Mexican farmhands. I had learned enough to permit someone now answering to the Basque name Itzal Etxebarria to work his way into the confraternity of doormen back in New York. I started as a janitor, living at a YMCA, pitching in on garbage days up and down Oppen’s block. I made it known I was always ready to perform odd handyman jobs in his building, always ready to step in when the other doormen were sick. I was ready when a position became available in the building. Why not Itzal? He knows us. He is a stable, trustworthy sort. So they said on the co-op board, agreeing to sponsor me for my green card.

  You were three years old then, your father unchanged, save for hair now gray at the temples. He took great care that you would always greet me politely, and in French. Bonjour, Itsy! you would say. Such an agreeable little girl you were. Do you remember it, our little game? Bonjour, Amy! I would say, and you would say, I’m not Amy, Itsy! I’m Emmy! And I would be sure to make the same mistake again, knowing that for my part I would never say, I’m not Itzal Etxebarria, I’m Yves, Yves Levaux, the father of Miriam.

  * * *

  —

  The girl, Jessica Burke, your father’s patient: she was the key. A kind girl, but troubled. For her appointments with David Oppen she would often arrive early, and rather than waiting in the little seating area outside his office, she and I would smoke together on the sidewalk. “Señor Itzal,” she would say, accepting my light, “one of the last smokers in New York.” She said, “I want to be a Basque shepherd in Wyoming. Make it happen for me, Itzal!” Because I was a doorman and immigrant, I could ask her anything. Did she have family? (Only her mother.) Did she have a boyfriend? (No. Love was a lie. She lived alone.) What did she need an expensive head-doctor for? “Oh, Itzal,” she would say, “life is complicated, and I don’t have any sheep to talk
to. Don’t you miss home?”

  * * *

  —

  It was much easier than it had been in Algeria, because the microphones by then were so much smaller. All I had to do was drill a little hole from the basement up through the floor under the couch in David Oppen’s ground-floor office. The tapes I made, I would listen to them into the night, taking notes, erasing them before morning. I began by recording all of his patients, but in time I taped only Jessica Burke. I could not have said what I was listening for, but I knew I had what I needed when she mentioned a poem, a poem she described in detail to him. “The Stolen Child,” it was called, by William Yeats. As for David Oppen, he knew it well. So he said to Jessica Burke. Of course he did. It had been one of Miriam’s favorites; she had performed a setting of it the year before she died.

  It was only once I had learned how to wait without knowing why, nor what for, nor for how long, that she was given into my possession. I was working the night shift; it must have been midnight, or a little after. She was desperate, crying, hysterical, and her breath bore a volatile odor. Itzal, she said, you have to help me. At first I thought, insanely, that she had come for my aid, but of course she had come for Dr. Oppen. Itzal, you have to make him. You have to make him come down. You don’t understand. He doesn’t understand.

  I said I could call him on the intercom, and she said she had called him already on the telephone, that she had only reached his answering machine. I told her to wait and I would get him. I would go to his apartment. I told her to wait for me on the lobby bench. That is what I said to her, but at his door—at your door—I stopped. I did not knock. The little peephole in the door was dark. I stood there and I waited. Minutes passed. Without knocking, I turned and went back downstairs. In the vestibule I told her he was not at home.