Death of the Black-Haired Girl

by Robert Stone

  “You know why I don’t buy it?”

  “Of course. You do it, you hurt other people. You hurt me.”

  “Let me tell you something. I don’t worry about eating the gun or not. I worry about blasting some individual or other. I can take being remembered as a suicide. I don’t want to go down as an asshole. The raging psycho.”

  “Don’t hurt yourself, Eddie. Put it in the hands of God—like—you know, man. Don’t hurt yourself anymore.”

  41

  ONE DAY THE FOLLOWING SPRING, Steve Brookman was walking on the campus for almost the last time when he happened to meet John Spofford and Mary Pick in front of the college library.

  Spofford, Brookman had been happy to learn, had not been fired after all. The decision to keep him on, Brookman thought, had been wise and just and not at all what Brookman might have expected from the college. The three of them stood in front of the library, the center of covert observation by many of the passersby. They agreed that Amesbury was a great place to be in April; it beat England any day, in spite of everything. People said more or less the same thing to each other every spring. Brookman was more than ready to subscribe to these ritual notions, aware that he expected to be six thousand miles away by the following April. Mary Pick was as cool as ever. Brookman and Spofford could not conceal their embarrassment.

  When they were all saying what Brookman and Spofford certainly hoped would be their ultimate goodbyes, Brookman gave him his hand and said, “Semper fi.”

  “Yes,” Spofford answered. “Right.”

  Immediately Brookman realized that the choice of words, in the circumstances, in the present company, was awkward. Spofford’s attempt to disappear the phrase was no less so. It was very painful.

  As the two men looked around for some route of withdrawal, Steve, John and Mary saw that a schizophrenic man often seen on campus—a man whose presence Brookman had noticed repeatedly in the weeks before the death of Maud Stack—was standing a few feet away from them. He was staring in something like terror at the three people who were blocking his path. As they hastened to step out of his way, the man uttered a sound, an anguished, fearful groan that seemed to emerge from somewhere inside him, somewhere so deep as to be incorporeal.

  Mary Pick looked stricken, though Brookman thought she must have seen him often before. “Are you all right, dear,” she said very sadly to the man.

  He gave them a last terrified glance, turned around so that he was headed the opposite way and hurried off. The three stood silently for a while, watching him go.

  42

  ELSA BEZEIDENHOUT BROOKMAN TAUGHT HER advanced anthropology class until June. Her husband had contracted for a book on the Kamchatka Peninsula, and he went to Seattle to prepare for the trip. In July Ellie gave birth to another daughter, whom she and Steve named Rosalind after the witty heroine of As You Like It. Brookman came east but missed the event itself, which occurred a little earlier than expected. He was not displeased to be the parent of another daughter. They spent three weeks together before Brookman returned to his operational headquarters. After that, he came back at least once a month before suspending his field research. At the end of the year Ellie moved out of the house the Brookmans had occupied.

  Ellie kept her job and, to the disapproval of many at the college, kept Brookman too. They planned to move to Boston, whence she would commute and where they were no longer a component of Amesbury’s social scene. Steve worked on his book. Over time he grew steadily more obsessed with tigers and planned more Siberian adventures, sometimes taking Ellie and the children along.

  Maud’s death, and the degree to which his illusion of love for Maud had been its occasion, filled him with remorse and regret. What he suffered most acutely was the sense of his own unworthiness, of the mediocrity into which life at the college, the position and privilege of it, had led him. And Ellie demanded of him something like a promise of connubial fidelity. Not in any formula, utterance, whispered verse or knitted motto. Something worse, something that racked him with shame because it forced him to understand that he had impelled a person such as she was to ask such a thing of him, when what he owed her was nothing less than the renewal of his moral existence.

  It came to be that the love and admiration he felt for Ellie, the strength he drew upon to feel like a worthwhile companion to her, were greater than any threat to what bound them together. Something like the same thing was true on Ellie’s side as well. She was in fact a proud person who knew well what love was. No one close to her had ever suspected her of not knowing that. A woman with a sure sense of what she required in a man and who put up with nothing out of mere fond regard. Enduring each other’s strengths, they survived something more formidable than serial adultery, jealousy or naive disillusionment. Survive they did, though, and made do with arctic winters, with watching the aurora and the proximity of tigers.

  For a long time Brookman imagined that he had come away intact from the things he had done and the things that had happened to him at the college. Then one day—a Siberian afternoon, while the trees in the forest around him crackled like rifle shots as their branches contracted and a shadow seemed to spread across the snow to darken it from soiled gray to nearly black, Brookman found himself lost. He was on familiar ground. The cabin he shared with Ellie could not have been half a mile distant. But the lay of the land made no sense to him, and nothing clued him to direction. In the next moment he fell. The fall was so violent it felt as though he had plunged downward from a fair height, and he was breathless when his shoulder met the frozen ground. When he tried to stand, the gloom around him seemed to grow deeper than before. He heard the violent snapping of the ice-bound limbs around him but there was not the slightest rush of wind, only frozen stagnant silence encasing the sounds. He had the sense there was a cat not far away.

  Brookman’s arm was stretched out on the dry dark snow and he tried to turn it, elbow down, to get a purchase on the ground. But as he labored, breathless now, to turn the arm one way, it turned the other. The more force he brought to bear, gritting his teeth, the more it rotated oppositely on the joint, leaving him in agony. He stared down at the palm of his hand, the palm he was trying to rise on. He shouted. Screamed was more like it. The dark surrounding forest served to illuminate his shame.

  Shame that he would never again elude. After that day’s fall the thought of what had happened would be a scourge to him as it had not been before, and every step he took thereafter would be edged with shadow. He had discovered the place to which his own capacity for excusing himself, his self-indulgence, could not penetrate.

  He did not die there in the pain and the cold as he expected but found his way to the cabin and to Ellie. Sleep failed him. His arm for weeks remained useless to him. He was, in a way, never the same again, though only he and Ellie would understand that.

  When he went to the nearest doctor, at a gold mine forty kilometers away, the Russian medic there manipulated his elbow joint with a triumphant smirk. “Nothing wrong with your arm, dude.” The Russians had lately taken to addressing people as “dude,” especially Americans, who they thought had no business being around.

  “It hurts like crazy,” Brookman told him.

  “Bummer,” said the medical man.

  He talked to Ellie about it as the use of his arm came back.

  “Things like that come over me sometimes,” she said. “Sort of fainting fits. I used to get them a lot when I was small. You must have caught it from me.”

  “It had a content, you know,” he said. “That falling. It seemed to be about something. You know? Everything that happened at home.”

  “Sure,” she said.

  The driver of the car that had killed Maud Stack was a graduate of the college that fielded the visiting team for which his younger brother played. He was a decorated U.S. Army captain and a veteran of Desert Storm. Since his service, he had suffered problems with alcohol and pills. He had not wanted to go to the game. After the accident he had gone into a panic
-driven fugue state and done all the dumb things—reported too late that his car was stolen, tried to do the body work on it himself, took it to a shop to attempt to conceal his own work. His girlfriend went to the police without his knowledge to confess to being the driver. When he found out, he walked into police headquarters and confessed to the crime. He had the court’s sympathy but got a year inside.

  The weather continued erratic in the months after Maud’s death. Days dawned in murky spring-like warmth and turned frigid in the afternoons. Other days took opposite turns. On one of the cold mornings Jo drove down to a dead factory town called Old Brighton to see a psychiatrist friend of hers named Victor Lerner. Dr. Lerner was the son of a famous Hungarian therapist who had fled to Harvard during the Second World War. Victor had lost a coveted chair of his own by eloping with a student patient to an ashram in India run by his cultic mentor.

  Since his dismissal Dr. Lerner had eventually regained his license and worked for the state on a contract basis. Most of his duty consisted in certifying applicants for disability benefits. He had an office out of which to conduct his sparse private practice, a crumbling nineteenth-century mansion that had belonged to an Old Brighton mill owner.

  Jo Carr and Victor Lerner had been involved with radicals in South America, but in different parts of the continent. Their bond was that they had both attempted to subscribe to some of the totalist metaphysical fantasies that had thrived in the previous century. Jo occupied one of the rickety chairs facing his Goodwill Industries blond, maple-like desk. Across the dismal street behind him, visible through his office window, car after car of a freight train rattled by on the Boston & Maine tracks. The open cars carried stacks of empty wooden pallets secured by metal binders.

  Victor and Jo had been talking about the death of Maud Stack. They had to suspend their conversation until the last freight car passed.

  “And the dreams?”

  “I dream about a place on the highest ridge of the Andes.”

  “You’ve been there before in dreams.”

  “Yes. And in the sky I see the stars. I see the constellation they call the Easel. Sacred in some places.”

  “How does that make you feel?”

  She almost laughed. He had asked her the same question many times before. “It’s a nightmare, Vic.”

  “And the associations . . .”

  “A corner of something constant, a spirit deep in history. A created order. And all of the notions we’ve both seen people lose their lives to.”

  “Structuralist thinking,” Victor said.

  “I dream of that terrible priest. I see him on the street. He belongs to the rest of it.”

  “You don’t need me to explain these things, Jo. You’ve already explained them to me.”

  “History . . . history is poisoned by claims on underlying truth. We’ve both been burned by people who think they represent them. Underlying truth. Do you think any of these things are objectively out there?”

  “Jo, on a scale of yes and no, I would have to say no. Counterintuitive as that may be.”

  “Why counterintuitive?”

  “Ah,” Victor said as another freight took sound and shape behind him. “Because people always want their suffering to mean something.”

  The rest of what he said was drowned out by the noise of the train.

  Jo never stopped regretting that she had not been given more time to help old Stack somehow. How she might have found a friend in him, and of course whether she could have encouraged him toward survival. She had the feeling he might have been fun to know. As Maud would have been, Jo was sure, had the kid lived into knowability. And people had once considered Jo herself diverting company. Thinking about what she might have done for Stack, for Maud, helped her through the futilities of her job.

  Stack died three months after his daughter. His ashes were placed with those of his wife and daughter in the crypt at Holy Redeemer.

  1

  Jerusalem, 1992

  THAT MORNING Lucas was awakened by bells, sounding across the Shoulder of Hinnom from the Church of the Dormition. At first light there had been a muezzin’s call in Silwan, insisting that prayer was better than sleep. The city was well supplied with divine services.

  He climbed out of bed and went into the kitchen to brew Turkish coffee. As he stood at the window drinking it, the first train of the day rattled past, bound over the hills for Tel Aviv. It was a slow, decorous colonial train, five cars of nearly empty coaches with dusty windows. Its diminishing rhythms made him aware of his own solitude.

  When the train was gone, he saw the old man who lived in one of the Ottoman houses beside the tracks watering a crop of kale in the early morning shade. The kale was deep green and fleshy against the limestone rubble from which it somehow grew. The old man wore a black peaked cap. He had high cheekbones and a ruddy face like a Slavic peasant’s. The sight of him made Lucas imagine vast summer fields along which trains ran, long lines of gray boxcars against a far horizon. Once Lucas dreamed of him.

  He had grapefruit and toast for breakfast and read the morning’s Jerusalem Post. A border policeman had been stabbed in the Nuseirat camp in the Gaza Strip but was expected to recover. Three Palestinians had been shot to death by Shin Bet hit squads, one in Rafah, two in Gaza City. Haredim in Jerusalem had demonstrated against the Hebrew University’s archeological dig near the Dung Gate; ancient Jewish burial sites were being uncovered. Jesse Jackson was threatening to organize a boycott against major league baseball. In India, Hindus and Muslims were fighting over a shrine that probably predated both of their religions. And, in a story from Yugoslavia, he saw again the phrase “ethnic cleansing.” He had come across the evocative expression once or twice during the winter.

  There was also a full-page story on the number of foreign pilgrims visiting the country for Passover and Western Holy Week. Lucas was surprised to find himself overtaken by the holidays.

  He dressed and took a second cup of coffee out on his tiny balcony. The day was innocently glorious; spring sunlight scented the pines and sparkled on the stone walls of Emek Refaim. For weeks he had been postponing work on an article about the Sinai he had contracted to write for Condé Nast. The deadline had passed the previous Friday, and before long they would be phoning him for it. Still, the fine weather inclined him to truancy. When at last he went to his desk, his open appointment book confirmed the date: Easter Sunday in the Latin church and also the sixteenth of Nisan. Passover had arrived the day before. On a sudden impulse Lucas decided to go over to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

  Bethlehem Road was nearly free of traffic. In spite of its elderly population, Lucas’s neighborhood in the German Colony was the most secular in the city and its atmosphere was never one of piety. Old couples strolled in the spring sunshine. The day before, he had seen a few young families loading their Volvos for camping trips in the desert or the Galilee. But walking up the nearly deserted avenue, past the terraces of the Cinematheque, under the ramparts of the Church of Scotland Hospice adorned with its bonny blue flag, he could feel the gravity of the ancient city across the canyon. A hundred tour buses were parked in the streets under the Old City walls. At the distant Jaffa Gate, he could see the swaying forms of mounted policemen herding a pressing crowd of bright pilgrims. At the other end of the fortress, a line of devotees toiled single file up the slope to the Zion Gate.

  He walked down into the shadow of the valley, over the bridge by the Sultan’s Pool and past the Koranic verse carved in the shell of the Ottoman fountain. “All that is created comes of water,” it read. Then, humbled by the looming walls, he trudged up the ascent to Zion.

  On the path to Zion Gate, he walked mainly among Orthodox Jewish men in black, bound for the Western Wall. Some of the Jews tried to converse with each other as they climbed, scrambling along the shoulder to keep pace. Besides the haredim, there were a few German Catholics on the path because the Dormition Abbey above them was a German church. These pilgrims were of the era before
Germans had become once again thin and handsome; many were florid and overweight, too bulkily dressed and perspiring freely. Yet they seemed happy. Most of the men looked plain and decent; they wore sodality pins and carried missals. Some of the women had sweet angelic faces. If they were sixty, Lucas calculated . . . born 1932, thirteen at the end of the war. He had picked up the habit of calculating Germans’ ages from the Israelis.

  It was a cheerful climb, with a smell of sage and jasmine on the wind and desiccated wildflowers underfoot and voices in Hebrew, Yiddish, German. The great walls reduced everyone, confounding all kingdoms. As he neared the ridge, the bells began again.

  Following the file toward the gate, he thought of a prophecy, in a Midrash someone had related to him. At the End of Days, multitudes would try to cross the Valley of Hinnom to the holy city. Christians, traversing a bridge of stone, would fall to perdition. Muslims, on a wooden bridge, would follow them. Then the Jews would cross, glorified, on a bridge of gossamer. What about me, Lucas wondered, not for the first time.

  The top of the trail was paved and provided for by the Jews of Canada. At its end, the mild children of wicked Edom and the pious men of Israel parted in sweet mutual oblivion, the Germans to their hugely unfortunate yellow abbey, the Jews toward the Western Wall. Lucas went his own way, north on Armenian Patriarchate Road. There he encountered more haredim headed for the Wall, putting the confusions of Easter behind them. In front of St. James’s Cathedral, teenage Armenian acolytes were dressing their ranks for a Sunday procession.

  On this conjunction of sacred seasons, the Jews and the Armenians in the crowded street pretended each other’s invisibility without colliding. A half-caste apologizing his way through the crush, Lucas was visited by a notion: that only he could see both sects. That where only the unseen mattered, he was reduced to mere utility, to petty observations and staying out of the way.