The Waters & the Wild

by DeSales Harrison

  He has to be home, Itzal, she said. We have a session tomorrow. He has a daughter.

  I told her there had been no answer.

  He needs to help me, she said. Itzal, he needs to help me.

  Let me help you, I said, but she only repeated herself. He needs to help me. He needs to help me.

  You are tired. You are just very tired, Jessica. Everything will be better in the morning, I said, aware only that these were the words I had said, again and again, to Miriam, my daughter, when her spells took hold of her.

  Yes, she said finally. She made a little laugh. Everything will be better in the morning. I’m sorry, Itzal. I’m going home now.

  I followed her out, catching up to her a little way down the sidewalk. I told her I was worried for her, that I would call her, that if I didn’t reach her I would come and check on her. I made her tell me her address, and she watched me write it down.

  * * *

  —

  At two in the morning, the night shift ended. Her building was only six blocks away. It would have been about 2:10 or 2:15 when I arrived. I rang her bell, but there was no response. I waited to see if anyone arrived or left. No one came. Finally, I pressed my hand along all the buttons on the panel. Someone, expecting someone else, tripped the buzzer and I was inside.

  I knocked on her door, though I knew she would not respond. It was unlocked. I opened it and stepped into the darkness of her apartment. From the bathroom came the sound of water. I sat on the edge of her bed. Behind the closed door, the water kept running, just a trickle, and that was the only noise. In the room I breathed the smell of paint, of linseed oil and turpentine.

  What looked like heavy blankets had been hung over the windows. When my vision adapted to the shadows I could make out sheets of paper or photographs clipped to a string stretched across the corner of the room, alongside thinner strips suspended like ribbons, negatives, I decided. Her apartment must also be her darkroom. How long did I wait there, and for what? I was aware that someone, anyone, having observed an intruder standing outside the apartment of a single woman, could have called the police. Perhaps I was waiting for the police. Perhaps, on the other hand, there would be the noise of splashing water, and Jessica Burke, having risen from her bath, would appear in the bathroom doorway, naked or wrapped in a towel. But no police arrived, and the only noise was the uninterrupted trickle from the bathroom.

  * * *

  —

  The needle still hung from her vein. When I touched her fingers they were cold. Her pulse was nearly undetectable, and her skin had darkened as though tarnished. Beside the bathtub, a candle had burnt down nearly to the floor. Under her sink, I located a stash of plastic sacks stuffed into an emptied tin. I removed one, and after searching a little longer, found a roll of masking tape next to her developing chemicals. I had to hold her upright to keep her from slipping down into the bathwater as I positioned the sack over her head, drawing the edges down and securing them with tape around her neck. Where the sack molded to her face, two little patches of mist, no bigger than bee’s wings, appeared against the plastic beneath her nostrils.

  The camera I found was a Leica, with a flat lens and no flash. It was already loaded with slow film, so I pulled down the blanket from her bathroom window, hoping to bring in the glare of a streetlight. I was amazed to discover instead that day had broken. First light streamed through the window onto her body. The patches of mist inside the plastic bag had now disappeared. Click went the shutter. Then once, twice again. I shot the entire roll, then removed the plastic sack and put it along with the camera in my pocket. I listened from behind her door for any sounds in the hallway. Hearing none, I slipped out into the hallway, down the stairs, and out onto the street.

  Later, when I walked by on my lunch break, there were two police cars and an ambulance outside the building, their strobe lights off, some uniformed officers standing on the sidewalk, drinking coffee. I waited until the paramedics had brought her down, face covered, on a stretcher, and watched as they loaded her into a low and windowless white van. The other vehicles dispersed. The police did not notice me. No one asked what I was doing there. Nothing happened.

  I rented a darkroom by the hour downtown and developed roll after roll of film—hundreds of pictures I had taken for practice of the wall or the window—until I was confident enough to develop the roll of film I had taken in Jessica Burke’s bathroom. When I saw it, finally, the image of her body in the bathtub, I knew what I had and what in time I would do with it. Even before I sent it to David Oppen, before I saw on his face what he had seen in the envelope, I knew that the hook was set. From that moment on, even when I was doing nothing but watching, standing behind the grille of your building’s door waiting for him to appear, I could feel it, the weight and tension on my line, the force of his struggle, and the strength with which he exhausted his strength.

  For three years my only care was that the line would not break. You grew into a teenager. Your beauty settled on you, whether you liked it or not, and you acceded to your womanhood. I watched you make your peace with this, even as I sensed in you the infiltration of a malaise. You no longer called me Itsy. You said you were leaving for France, as soon as you could. Through the line I felt the vibration of your father’s agony as though it were my own. You would leave as soon as you could, and when you left, I would be ready.

  * * *

  —

  More than fifteen years had passed since I had set foot in my country, or should I say, our country? You could have no memory of it, and what I saw in Paris I hardly recognized: new heroic architecture crowding the Seine and the avenues, American coffee shops, Russians on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, Senegalese priests in the pulpits. You were not, for all that, difficult to find, nor was it difficult for me to blend in—no longer Basque, no longer Itzal Etxebarria, just an aging Frenchman like so many others. You never noticed me. How could you have? You were not looking for Itzal the doorman, but for someone you had never seen. You were looking for Miriam’s parents. How close I came to you that day in the café as you pored over that map of the Morvan, that range of black hills rising east of Nevers and the farmland of the Nivernais.

  It was there, in the Morvan, you came looking for me. It was there, after my departure from New York, that I had broken open the door of my house—hardly a house, really a cabin—and swept away the cobwebs and accumulated dormouse droppings. The cabin is the only possession I had kept in France, paying the pittance of tax I owed with an American money order sent in once a year. The run-down structure had been my father’s, and before that his great-uncle’s. Originally it had been a tenant farmer’s, one half for housing animals, the other for human habitation, a single room with an open hearth. My wife and I would bring Miriam there on the weekends; it is not far from Nevers. The land around it was sold long ago, so aside from the building itself, all I own is a little gravel court enclosed by a hedgerow on three sides and by the house on the fourth, the hillside sloping up behind it. My nearest neighbor lived almost a kilometer away, a spinster who had for reasons I never knew nursed a grudge against my father and all Levaux. She allowed the use of her telephone at the rate of one franc—now one euro—per call. When I took up occupancy again after my long absence, I undertook to cultivate her favor, clearing brush from her woods, and, on the morning you appeared, carting her garbage to the town dump in her old Renault sedan.

  It had been in the same moldering sedan that I had made my final trip to the post office, to send my final letter to David Oppen. Every New Year, David Oppen had given me a gratuity, two stiff new hundred-dollar bills folded in a card. You would sign the card too—just a little scribble at first. Naturally, receiving even a single cent from him would be intolerable, but the fact that he tipped me twice as much as any other resident was torture. Of course I could not spend the money, but I did force myself to keep it. I set it aside. The years went by. The s
tack of bills grew, folded over and stuffed in a bandage tin. A week or so before you appeared on my hillside, I had taken the money out of its tin. I counted it. A little over three thousand dollars. The sum no longer tormented me because I knew what I would do with it. I would prepare the last letter.

  My last letter: it was smaller than some of the others had been, just a regular envelope in which I had placed the two tickets I had purchased with the folded bills, one for the flight from New York to Paris, the other for rail passage from Paris to Nevers.

  Along with the tickets, I had sent a small photograph of some items I had assembled in the underbrush of the riverbank, just downstream of the Isle of Terns: a length of chain, purchased at the hardware store LaPorte, as well as a flywheel from an old steam pump, bought at a flea market. I placed this little sheaf of documents in an envelope addressed to David Oppen at his postal box, our little rendezvous. I had seen his face after I sent the photograph of Jessica Burke. I knew how deeply the hook was set in him, how inexorable the compulsion to return to the box, to learn what awaited him there.

  The day you appeared at my house in the Morvan was only two or three days after I sent that letter. When I had returned my neighbor’s Renault after carting her garbage to the dump, she said to me, “Your American granddaughter is coming to visit you.” Of course I told her I had no granddaughter, American or otherwise. She said, “Monsieur, it is not impossible that you would have a granddaughter whom you do not know,” then announced with evident pride that she had received a call from this person, not an hour earlier. My neighbor said that this person sounded Parisian but claimed she was American, and had stated that she hoped she could pay her grandfather a visit. She was to arrive in the afternoon.

  I made it known to my neighbor that I had no intention of staying at home to receive a nonexistent granddaughter. Nevertheless I hurried back, and in great agitation contrived to spend the rest of the day on the far side of the hedgerow bordering my yard, pretending to trim the outer side even though the cows had already cropped it. When you arrived, you appeared alone, on foot, though you must have hitched a ride from the station in Luzy. Through a gap in the hedge, I watched you knock at my door, and knock again. Finally you tore off a corner of your map, took out a pen, and leaning against the jamb, began to write a note.

  Even when I had seen you poring over maps of Nevers and its environs at that café in Paris, I had thought only of how David Oppen would respond if he learned you were planning such a trip. I had never considered it possible that you would in fact locate my little, hidden house. Yet there you were, leaning against the side of the door, scratching your pen against the paper, struggling to make it write. You shook it, touched the tip to your tongue, scratched it again—but nothing. You pried the little plug from the rear of the pen and blew into it. Finally you gave up, and after walking once around the house, hoisting yourself on tiptoe beneath the windows to peer inside, you stared for a long minute out over the valley before turning and walking down toward the main road.

  What would you have said to old man Levaux, had he appeared from behind the hedgerow? What would you have done when you realized, as he approached, that the Yves Levaux you sought was none other than Itzal Etxebarria? And what would I have done? Watching you struggle with the pen, watching you hesitate before knocking a second time on the door, or standing on tiptoe, your hand cupped against the dark glass, I knew then that I could never touch a hair of your head.

  I had climbed up behind the house so that I could watch you as you departed. If you had looked up onto the hillside, I think now that you would have seen me. But of course you did not look up, and of course you did not see me. You did not see that I was weeping. I know now that I would not see you again, the little American girl who had called me Itsy, the little American girl who was now a beautiful young woman who had come to find me, out of the desire to know her past, out of love for the woman she believed to be her mother—and had now disappeared forever. But at that moment I believed I wept because I had released my grip on the snare I had knotted and reknotted, night after night. I wept, I thought, because I myself had been freed from the snare.

  That was the moment, precisely, when it ended. The dream had simply released me, the dream of revenge that had devoured all the long years since Miriam took her life. When I reached the house, there was no trace of you anywhere, no note, no exhausted pen, not even a crumpled scrap of map. I knew then there was no chain that could not be cut, no sentence that could not be commuted. I knew that there was no one who could not be freed, even from such a snare as I had knotted—night after night, year after year. I cannot explain the joy I felt when I thought: You are no kin to me. No blood of mine flows in your veins. It was with an unspeakable tenderness I thought: You, child, are a stranger to me.

  On the heels of that recognition came another. I understood that the letter I had sent, my final invitation to David Oppen, would be the last contact between us. I knew that he would not obey my summons and appear. I was not disappointed. In fact, this realization seemed to restore me to a spotless innocence, accompanied by a surge of distilled contempt. Of course he would not appear. Holding those tickets, reading their dates and destinations, he would see the path open before him, the path that justice required him to take. He would see the path, he would hesitate, and in the end he would turn away, his future a coward’s future.

  With what pleasure I envisioned for him the agony of the following weeks, the wait between his refusing my summons and the moment when finally after months of silence he would hear your voice again. You would tell him you were tired and penniless and done with traveling and wanted to come home. Without your knowing it, your voice would also inform him that I had released you. He would know then that perfect justice had tracked him down, had lain in wait, had breathed upon him, and with godly disdain had cast him aside.

  It was not that my plan had failed, only that its fruition was utterly unlike what I had imagined. The moment had arrived, and the plan had been accomplished, but not in the service of revenge. Instead, the accomplishment was an intolerable mercy. My trap would shut, but not on a victim. It would instead shut like a book, a book of accounts zeroed out and closed forever.

  Just as I had let you walk free, down the hill away from my house, I had let him free as well. No one would appear on the bank of the Loire at the appointed hour. I alone would be the one to finish it, carrying the weight of chain and the flywheel out into the channel. I would be the one to lay down the burden in the Loire, to cast it away and emerge again on the bank, alive, dripping, and released.

  * * *

  —

  That is how it could have happened. That is how it should have happened. So you can imagine my astonishment when he did appear on the riverbank, at the appointed hour. What froze me was the realization that the net I had knotted night after night was not of my solitary handiwork, but that it had been a secret, silent collaboration. All along another set of hands had been just as busily knotting and reknotting the opposite edge of the net. His labor had been as dogged and intent as my own, though what his fingers fashioned was not a snare but a shroud.

  “Etxebarria, Itzal,” he said to me, and then, “Monsieur Levaux.”

  “Do you know how long I have waited for this rendezvous, Mr. Oppen?” I asked him.

  “Yes,” he said. “I do know how long.”

  “Out there, just beyond this little island, which is called the Isle of Terns. That is where she drowned.”

  “I know,” he said. “With our child.”

  “Yes,” I said, “with the child.”

  “I assume—you brought it with you, everything—” he said, “everything necessary.” Without waiting for confirmation, he continued. “First, though, a request,” he said, pressing into my hands something he had carried, a heavy package. “It is for a priest, in America. Please send it for me. It is, you could say, a sort of confe
ssion.” The package was a block of unbound pages, wrapped in a heavier paper and tied with twine.

  “It is not for the girl?” I asked.

  “She does not know. She cannot,” he said.

  “She tried to find me—” I said, and sensed a chill pass through his body with this news, “but she did not. I saw to it. The girl is free.”

  “Free,” he said, as though the word were strange to him. “She must learn that now. You know where she is. Let my lawyer know where he can find her. His name is Hale, Albert Hale. He will tell her what happened to me.”

  “As are you, Oppen,” I said. “You are free. You are free to leave this place.”

  I spoke again: “I mean what I say, Oppen. It is over.” I pressed the package back into his hands. “Go find the girl,” I said. “She has no parent but you.” It was only after speaking these last words that I understood how irreparably they had torn me. They had torn him too, I thought, because he grasped my shoulder and pressed his packet against my chest. I said, “Oppen, you must leave,” trying to push him away and failing because he was at least a half head taller than I. I felt again the force of his struggle, but the force had become a sheer weight, bearing down on me, so that I was no longer trying to push him away or fend him off but to hold him up. The package fell with a thud at our feet. I braced myself against his leaning bulk. I thought I would surely fall with him, but he buckled, first to his knees, then toppled sidelong onto the sand at the water’s edge, lying where he fell, even though his head was half-submerged in the water, and the river’s froth collected in his mouth. I moved to drag him back, but he was heavy, and I managed only to haul his head above the waterline before I slipped back into a useless position against the bank.