Rothchild was happy and so, in her way, was Maria. Anxiety had died for them. Christopher stood up. Maria touched the back of Rothchild’s outstretched hand, trailed her fingertips over its veins and bones, and went to Christopher. She put her arms around his neck and pressed her cheek on his. He felt the sharp bone in her temple and her teeth beneath her lip.
“Oh, Paul,” she said. “You and Otto are so alike.”
“Are we?” Christopher said.
Maria, flushed and still smiling, stepped away from him. She knew that nothing was going to happen to her except that she was never going to see Christopher again.
Christopher turned to Rothchild; Rothchild was smiling at him. Christopher waited for Patchen to notice the silence and turn around; he was examining the paintings again.
Christopher said, “Kolka Zhigalko.”
It was Maria who was startled; up to this moment she had known everything. Her glance darted from Patchen to Christopher to Rothchild. She saw the name register in Rothchild’s eyes, and spoke to him. He lifted a hand to silence her.
“All right, Paul,” he said.
Christopher told them Don Jorge’s tale. Rothchild’s face relaxed, he stared at a point in space, smiling in affectionate recognition as the story unfolded. Christopher stopped speaking. Maria clutched his arm.
“To use me for that?” she said to Rothchild. She shook Christopher’s arm for a violent instant, as if she could change the patterns of knowledge in his mind, and so change Rothchild’s past, like beads in a kaleidoscope.
“For love, Otto?” she said. “After a quarter of a century, you had me murder your old lover? You were ashamed of love?”
“What other reason could have been strong enough?” Rothchild asked.
Maria went to the window again. Patchen went with her; they were on the sixth floor. Maria shuddered, Patchen put a hand on her hair.
“Kolka felt strongly,” Christopher said. He told Rothchild where Kolka Zhigalko had got his new name.
“Kamensky was the name the NKVD game me?” Rothchild cried. His upper body sprang forward, he nearly lost his balance, saving himself by clutching the arms of his chair. “Kolka took my name in Madrid?”
“Yes, and wore it like a ring back into Russia, and into the camps.”
Rothchild was transformed. He smiled without restraint, muttered a phrase in Russian. He was looking at an absent figure, hearing old conversations. For the first time since the NKVD had photographed him and Kolka together, Otto Rothchild’s person was visible; his wife stared at him, rage rising in her face. He didn’t see her.
“Kolka,” he said, laughing, speaking in Russian, “Kolka–a secret marriage, a secret marriage.”
He went on laughing, as he had done when he had defeated the lie detector, until his voice fled and his cheeks were blistered with tears.
Christopher said, “One last fact, Otto.”
Rothchild, still laughing, nodded.
“Did you believe Kolka was an agent? Did you believe what the NKVD told you when they showed you the pictures?” Rothchild wiped his eyes. “Of course,” he said. “I’m a professional.”
TWENTY
1
On their last night in Madrid, Christopher and Cathy had gone to the Corral de la Moreria for supper. The flamenco there was not authentic; the girls were too pretty and their dresses were too new. They were decor, not dancers. But the place made Cathy happy–a guitarist she admired was playing that night, and she liked the wine and the paella. “The food in this country is so wonderful,” she said. “You can either have paella, or all the things that go into paella, one thing at a time.” The simplicity of Spanish life made her feel free. “The Spaniards never mix their colors,” Cathy said. “Everything is what it seems to be.” Christopher gave her a look. “So it’s an illusion; I’ll keep it,” Cathy said.
A new performer was introduced, a young girl wearing a round brimmed hat and a male dancer’s short jacket and high-waisted trousers. Her costume shocked the Spaniards in the audience, as it was designed to do. But the girl’s voice, when she began to sing, carried them away. She had the voice for flamenco, ardent and true, with the hoarse tone, almost hidden among the notes of song, that Cathy called the scar on the heart. All fine singers had it, she told Christopher, and this girl had a wonderful one. The audience showed passion for her, and the girl was carried away by it. She sang the whole repertoire of flamenco songs, with the clapping hands of the company and the guitars playing behind her. Her limelit face, simple and homely, shone with sweat, and she listened with absorbed attention to the pitch of her own voice, as though she wished to be sure that it was fit for other ears before releasing it. She had no guile, and she made no attempt to hide her rapture. Cathy looked at the singer, and then into Christopher’s face, and said, “Me.”
Later, when Cathy cataloged her lovers in Don Jorge de Rodegas’s garden, Christopher remembered this scene. She told him that she was finished with lovers. But Cathy’s sexuality was like the flamenco singer’s voice, an innocent thing of the body. He hadn’t believed she had come to him a virgin and he didn’t believe that she took no pleasure from her lovers. She carried too much of it back to him. The others had touched and changed her; he Felt it in her body. They were both excited by it. Cathy, who had always wanted to talk about everything, would not talk about this. “No one stays in my mind but you,” she said. “It’s you, Paul, whose memory is populated by old lovers; you never forget anything. If you remember phone numbers for twenty years, and you do, how would you forget the exact feeling you had with every one of those girls?”
The next day, they had driven over the Pyrenees, passing near the place where Solange had died, and down into the green valley on the French side of the frontier. Cathy wanted to go to Lourdes, she had never seen it. They agreed that she would drive back to Rome while Christopher went by train to Paris.
“Do tell Maria Don Jorge’s tale of Kolka and Kamensky.”
“That’s why I’m going to Paris,” Christopher had said.
2
Christopher, when he returned to Rome, found Cathy at home, listening to her tapes, with sheets of music spread over the tables and on top of the piano. The Siamese cat he had bought for her on their anniversary slept on the carpet in a patch of sunlight.
Cathy had found a frame, old and ornate, for the Goya drawing, and it hung above the bed.
She had been thinking about Otto Rothchild. “I don’t believe I saw all of Otto in that story of Don Jorge’s,” she said. Christopher had involved her with Rothchild and used her against him; he told her enough of the truth to let her understand what Rodegas’s tale had explained.
“But why?” Cathy asked. “Twenty-five years of agony for what?”
“He was afraid of what had happened with Kolka. You say that lovers won’t let you forget them. When Otto remembered Kolka–every day, I suppose–he remembered what he really was.”
“A queer.”
“No one cared about that. But his homosexuality, and his having done business with the NKVD in Madrid, laid Otto open to blackmail. That’s the unforgivable sin–to be vulnerable. It puts everything in hazard.”
Cathy stroked the purring cat. Having it reminded her, she said, how much she loved animals, and she carried it with her from room to room. Now, on the terrace, it struggled to be put down and Cathy let it go. It walked along the balustrade, uttering a shrill mew. The sun was going down; Cathy and the animal were blank figures with the last light behind them.
“Why did you have to do what you did to him, Paul? It was so cruel, so awful a punishment. Why not just find him out, tell him you knew, put it in those files you’re always talking about? Release him from the fear of discovery.”
“If he had told us the truth, we would have done that.”
“He made you angry by keeping silent? Paul–you?”
“No. He broke trust. We can’t be what we are without absolute trust, Cathy. We live by it.”
“And
you took it away from Maria’s husband because he lost control of himself in 1936 and loved another person, and kept that secret from you? You have to know every secret?”
“You heard what Don Jorge said. He knows.”
Christopher looked at the sunset. The cat rubbed its back against his hand.
“Little by little,” Cathy said, “I’m learning from you.”
Rome, in August, was almost empty. Cathy and Christopher were the only tenants in their apartment house who weren’t out of the city on vacation. The building had once been a palazzo and now, with its cold marble halls and staircases empty and silent, it seemed like one again. Cathy opened the doors when she played sometimes, and the sound of the piano would fill the whole building. Christopher went to the top of the stairs to listen to her playing Haydn; the music was amplified through some trick of the palazzo’s stone. As they always had done, they lived mostly in public. Cathy wanted to watch the sunset from the Pincio, to drink Negronis at Doney’s, to eat spaghetti at Moro and artichokes at Piperno. When the food was before her, she ate little of it; she talked, telling Christopher stories of her family, of horses, of other animals she had owned. She made him laugh. “It’s funny, I remember everything that happened to me as a child, and everything that you and I have done together–every detail,” she said. “But nothing in between. Will I remember anything that happens afterward?”
She behaved like someone preparing for a voyage. In places where she and Christopher had been happy, she recalled the exact words spoken on the earlier occasion, the food they had eaten. Christopher saw that she was wearing the clothes that she had worn in the past to certain restaurants and theaters. He interrupted her reminiscences one night:
“Yes, I remember. You were wearing the same things you have on tonight–the blue linen suit, and your grandmother’s pearls, and the same perfume.”
Cathy leaned across the table–they were in a theatrical restaurant called the Flavia where she was mistaken for a film actress–and kissed Christopher.
“Oh, it’s a joy to love a man with a perfect memory,” she said.
“Why the costumes, Cathy, and all this time travel to the things we did together last year? What’s wrong with now?”
“It was you who told me,” she said, smiling, “that there’s no such thing as the present. I’m just thinking of my future, storing up things.”
When, after a week, Christopher told her that he had to go to Africa, she showed none of her old temper. In his pursuit of Rothchild he had neglected his other agents; he would have to travel more than usual in order to see them. He told Cathy so, but she didn’t want to talk about it. She wanted to go to the Arlberg in the fall, to walk in the mountains. She wrote to the manager of the Mooserkreuz to book a room. “Won’t it be wonderful to be in the mountains?” she asked. “There’ll be snow on some of them, Paul; maybe we can ski, early in the day.”
Driving him to the airport, she turned and smiled as they passed Ostia Antica; it was the first time they had gone past the ruins together since the night they had gone inside in the rain.
In the bar at Fiumicino she asked for champagne. It was after midnight, all flights to Africa left in the night, and they were alone with the bartender. The shriek of the jets and the stink of burnt kerosene activated Cathy’s old feelings about Christopher’s departures.
“Christ, I’ll be alone,” she said, and bit her lips.
“So will I, and in the Congo.”
“There’s a difference. You’ll tell me nothing when you come back, if you do. Men go out like candles when they go away. You could die down there, a war is going on, without ever telling me what I’ve told you.”
“What do you call what you’ve told me?”
“Everything.”
Christopher’s patience broke. Horst Büllow was dead, and Kolka Zhigalko and Masha, and he might find a dead man awaiting him in the Congo. What did Cathy know about being alone?
“Everything?” he said. “Where is the other cat?”
3
In the Congo, Christopher found his agent, a man called Alphonse Nsango, sickened by magic. An enemy had put a juju curse on Nsango. His tribe believed that the liver was the seat of life, and within him Nsango felt his liver being devoured. He told Christopher, in a matter-of-fact tone, that he sometimes saw the spirit that was destroying him.
“It’s a woman, all bones; I see her, just a wink of her, when she goes into me at night.”
Christopher didn’t doubt what he was told. Nsango’s face was haggard, the flesh was falling from his tall body. He was seized by violent fits of trembling. Outside the hut in the forest where Nsango now lay was an encampment of his followers. Nsango had been driven out of the capital, but many believed that he would come back as the head of his nation. Christopher had paid boys to write Nsango’s name on walls in Léopoldville and Élisabethville; he had given journalists money to write stories about him. Nsango acted out the necessary legends, as he told Christopher in sardonic French, and Christopher transferred them into public consciousness.
Nsango had met him at a road junction, miles from his camp, and driven with him in a Jeep through the dark trees. In an abandoned village the headlights had picked up something that did not have a natural shape. The two men walked across the beaten earth inside the circle of conical huts that had been the central place of the village. Nsango beckoned the Jeep nearer. In the stronger glow of its headlamps they saw what they had found: a heap of human hands, the right hands of men, women, and children, with bloody stumps for wrists; the fingers were curved and delicate and, except that they were black, might have been Cathy’s, mutiplied by mirrors, ready to strike a chord on a piano. “Someone cut off all the right hands in the village, it’s a punishment from the old Belgian days,” Nsango said. He put his hand on the pile of hands. “Is this country an insane mind?” he asked.
It took a long time to heal Nsango. The local juju men could do nothing. Christopher knew of a man in the Ivory Coast who had powerful gifts. Nsango could not be taken there. The kind of juju that afflicted him could only be cured at the place where the spell had been cast. Christopher was three hundred miles from the nearest American and he had no reliable communications. He went himself to Abidjan and brought the sorcerer back to the Congo. It took several days to drive the evil spirit out of Nsango’s body and into the body of his enemy. There was fear among the Africans that Christopher’s presence would diminish the powers of the witchman, and he remained inside a hut, some distance from the others. He heard drums and incantations in the night, and when he looked out he saw, outside the chief’s house where Nsango lay, figures darting, like Cathy’s jealousies, from the darkness to the firelight and back again. By day, in the heat, he began to write a long poem for Cathy in his notebook.
Nsango, freed of his curse, regained his humor. “What happened to me, Paul, will show you that I am still truly of my people,” he said. When he was within his tribe he wore its dress, spoke its language, and lived by its customs, but he had been educated by Christians and sent to a university in Europe. “The Jesuits separated my mind from my body,” Nsango said; one part of his nature taunted the other. He and Christopher spoke about revolution. Nsango wanted guns. “You and I have had enough ideas,” he told Christopher, “the time for ideas has not come in this country.” When they first met and became friends, Nsango had spoken of something he called revolution without rage. Now he wanted to kill–he had changed no more than Christopher.
Christopher gave the sorcerer gold and sent him back to his own country. Nsango did not thank Christopher or speak of the incident; he feared that the juju might not truly have been broken, because Christopher was involved. Without his friend and the gold Nsango would have died; but he didn’t know what might befall him in the future in retribution for having brought an outsider into secret things.
4
Cathy’s other cat remained, with her other clothes and her other jewelry and scent, in her apartment in the Piazza Or
atorio. Christopher never went there. Sometimes, if he came home with out warning, Cathy would still be in the other place and he would wait for her to call. She phoned their apartment at noon each day to see if he had returned, and when he answered she would hang up without speaking; in an hour she would appear, bathed and dressed in the clothes she kept for him.
Her hysteria recurred and grew worse. Christopher went back to Africa, and to Asia, and to northern Europe. Each time he returned she came to him from a lover. She went back to being the lover she had been at the beginning of their marriage, frenzied and taking what she wanted. She made love with her eyes open and watchful–waiting for the instant, she said, when Christopher would be drawn out of himself.
They went to the Arlberg as Cathy had planned and walked, with a picnic lunch in a rucksack, along paths in the evergreen woods. It snowed and they skied. Christopher was sick, he had relapsed into dysentery while he was with Nsango, and when he stayed in the room one afternoon Cathy found someone in the hotel to go to bed with. It was the first time this had happened. Always before, she had kept herself to Christopher unless he was in another country. She was shaken by what she had done; she blamed it on drink–she had had wine with her lunch and cognac afterward, and the man had begun to talk to her in bad English.
“I don’t know what’s happening, Paul, I’m beginning to want the others,” she said. “I have to talk to you.” She told him again what she had told him in Spain: name after name. “I always know their names,” she said, in a voice as brittle as Maria Rothchild’s. Moroni, the first man she had taken, was jealous of the others; her other lovers had made him impotent. “He’s mad and bad, Paul, hard to control.”
Christopher listened to her as he would have listened to an agent’s complaints, with the surface of his mind. He knew she wouldn’t change. He told her that he wanted a divorce.
Secret Lovers Page 31