The Double

by Ann Gosslin

  At the sound of that odious name, a chill coursed through his veins, and Malik stiffened. Was Gessen implying he was a murderer? ‘I’m not responsible for anyone’s death,’ he said. ‘I have no memory of my actions in Copenhagen. As for Vidor Sovàny, when he went into the Seine, he nearly took me with him. The next thing I knew, I was lying on the pavement, soaking wet, with a man asking something about a name. I thought he wanted to know the other boy’s name. “Vidor,” I said. “Well, Vidor,” he replied, whacking me on the back as I coughed up a mouthful of water. “You had a pretty close call. Most people that fall into the river never come out again.”

  ‘Vidor. To my addled brain, the name sounded right. The next thing I remember was being on a Channel ferry chugging through the dark. I was wearing one of Vidor’s jackets and had his passport in the pocket of my jeans – Vidor’s jeans. No idea how I got them. Perhaps I went back to the Sovàny’s flat while everyone was asleep? I was sick with nausea and my head ached so badly I believed in that moment that Vidor, trapped in limbo, had managed to possess my body so he could torment my soul. That would be my penance: forced to embody his malevolent spirit, a fate I had no wish to endure.

  ‘Only after several days, exhausted by confusion and misery, did I realise it was my ticket to freedom. As Vidor, I could start over in a new country, shed my old self like an unwanted skin. Abandon the wretched Malik to the churning waters of the Seine. A stain on his family since birth, who would miss him?’

  Malik’s mouth had gone dry, and he could scarcely speak. ‘It wasn’t until later that I discovered what a dangerous bargain I’d made. To sell one’s soul to the devil… there’s always a price isn’t there? Vidor is stronger than I am… With each passing year, more of my essence is chipped away, and it becomes harder to resist him. Only in the dark of night can I gather enough strength to assert myself, but it’s just enough to rebel in a minor way against his basest impulses.’

  60

  Outside the frosted windows, it had grown dark, though it was impossible to say how much time had passed. Malik seemed to have drifted through varying stages of waking and sleep. At some point, someone had wheeled in a table laden with dishes of food. He had no appetite, but nodded when Gessen offered him a plate.

  ‘Do you want to know what tipped me over the edge?’ Malik asked, his voice heavy with fatigue. ‘The dark fissure in my life that ultimately brought me to you, and to this particular place and time.’ The sight of the food, some kind of fish in saffron sauce, turned his stomach. He stretched out on the sofa and closed his eyes. ‘It’s a story as old as time, though not a pretty one.

  ‘Once upon a time, a naïve young man fled his wretched beginnings to start a new life in a fabled metropolis. The loftiest of all cities, where the great thinkers of Europe had trodden on hallowed ground: Voltaire, Descartes, Rousseau, Sartre. To walk those same streets, to breathe the rarefied air, was all he’d ever wanted. What our young man did not understand, however, despite the bloodshed and turmoil from which he’d fled, is that once he set foot on the sacred ground of his dreams, he would be viewed as an alien creature, someone to be despised and feared.

  ‘One day, not long after he arrived, the boy was invited to have a drink at the cafe table of three young women. International students, just like himself, embarking on the great adventure of their lives. He readily accepted, anxious to belong, even accepting a glass of wine though he’d never touched alcohol before. He was so enamoured of his beautiful new friends that when asked where he came from, he readily named the place of his birth. What he didn’t expect, what he could not have imagined, was what happened next. Two of the girls looked shocked and instantly rose. Terror was stamped on their faces as they rushed to get away. In his mind, he was an innocent young boy, eager to embrace the riches of life that had long been denied him. But to those girls, he was… what? A white slaver, a terrorist? An evil creature intent on slitting their throats the moment they dropped their guard. Even after all these years, their fear and disgust has remained with him. A constant companion, never fading.

  ‘Spat on in the Metro, cursed by cab drivers, it became clear that the city of Rousseau and Voltaire was not for the likes of him. To survive, he learned to stay in the shadows and keep his head down, though sometimes during lectures when the greats of Western civilisation were discussed, he wanted to shout at his professors, “Why do we not learn about Al-Khwarizmi, the great mathematician and astronomer? Or Ibn Sina, Avicenna, the brilliant Persian physician upon whose works modern medicine was built?” Those great men, and many others, dismissed as nobodies and forgotten in their graves, all because they happened to worship a different god or wore a turban on their head.’

  Gessen had yet to move a muscle, afraid to disturb the rush of memories he’d waited so long to hear. The mystery of how Malik’s emotions had hardened into stone, so many years ago, was at last coming into view: feel nothing, reveal nothing, let no one in. Now, with nothing left to lose, he tossed with abandon at Gessen’s feet the bone he’d been chasing for weeks.

  ‘In that terrible frame of mind,’ Malik continued, lying back and closing his eyes, ‘I wandered the streets, feeling like pond scum, wondering if it wouldn’t be better to pack up and leave the city for good. Not knowing of course that, a few days later, I would be drawn into the Seine by the sadistic boy who’d been trying for months to annihilate my very soul.

  The sun streamed through the bright green leaves as I walked and walked, not knowing where I was headed. When I turned a corner, sick with despair and weak with hunger, I looked up to see a man coming out of the cinema.’ He paused. ‘A man came out of a cinema. Such a simple thing. But not in this case.’

  He opened his eyes and looked at the ceiling. ‘That man was my father.’

  Malik gave Gessen a sad smile. ‘All this time you’ve been anxious to meet the man himself, and here he is at last. Exhibit A: The man who betrayed his own people, during the war of independence, in an act of despicable treachery. Villages razed to the ground, countless innocents slaughtered. The man who terrorised me as a child. The man I was told had died when I was twelve.’

  He examined Gessen’s face, hoping for a flicker of disgust, or even surprise, but Gessen’s eyes, etched with deep lines at the corners, showed only sorrow. Perhaps he had guessed long ago. As the two men faced each other, Malik – or was he Vidor now? – couldn’t help but wonder how far they had travelled. Having lost track of the game, what had become of the king? Was it check or checkmate? Sheikh or sheikh mat? Dead or alive, what did it matter? In his soul where it counted, he had been dead for a very long time.

  As a pain stabbed his temple, he squeezed his head between his hands, and a wave of nausea knocked him flat. Someone – or something – grabbed him by the throat and choked him with an iron grip. As the walls closed in and he struggled to breathe, a shadow fell upon him and everything went dark.

  * * *

  The journey home was a blur of green and white and grey. Above ground and below, he passed through a maze of tunnels, black as pitch, but they had lost the power to frighten him. How strange that such gloom, deep underground, could bring him moments of peace. He yearned for nothing more than to lie down in that darkness and sleep for eternity.

  No such luck. Jostled by the train and delirious with exhaustion, he remembered hearing, or thought he’d heard, a voice coming at him in a series of waves. Fragments of a story told in a circular fashion. The tale of a father, not his own, who’d harboured a monstrous evil in his heart, and an unquenchable thirst for death. So he wasn’t alone, even in this.

  Days had passed, or so it seemed, by the time he was jostled awake to find himself guided through a tall iron gate both familiar and strange. Helped by a kindly man with moss-green eyes, he was led to a wooden house with the steep roof and carved shutters of a cottage from a fairy tale. The room contained a wide bed and an armchair patterned in green and gold. A brass bowl held an array of polished stones. Amethyst, jasper, lapis lazuli, ma
lachite. Their pleasing colours and shapes gave him comfort. Someone helped him out of his clothes and into bed, but rather than sleep, his thoughts slid free. Gliding down rivers, scaling mountains, soaring like a falcon above a dry and desolate land of ochre and umber, barren as the moon.

  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away.

  When at last he woke, hours, days, or weeks later, his mind was once again clear. On the table by the bed, someone had placed a travel clock. The sight of it should have made him happy, but he felt nothing as the minutes ticked away. Time. What did it matter now?

  Lying next to the clock was a faded photo. Where did it come from? He remembered the doctor handing him something as he boarded the train. A small square of cardboard. He held it in his hands and stared into the eyes of a boy in a pair of grubby trousers, cut off at the knee, squinting in the sun. No matter how many times he’d tried to vanquish that small boy, desperate to be seen, he travelled with him always. How many hours, how many years, had that boy been swimming against the tide? Asking nothing more than to be seen and heard, as he struggled to break free.

  Malik looked around and recognised the room by the paintings on the wall. A seascape with sandpipers. A camel caravan shimmering in the desert. Brighter than he remembered, nearly incandescent. He counted the birds. Only nine, not the ten as he’d once believed. Or had he only dreamed the presence of the extra bird? He couldn’t recall seeing the painting in the daylight before.

  A pale sun streamed through the crack in the blinds. It was all coming back to him, the life he’d had, and the one he’d cast away. He slipped his feet into a pair of fine wool slippers and circled the room with his eyes half closed, arms crossed over his chest in an attitude of supplication.

  Voyage autour de ma chambre. A journey around my room. Though small, the space contained magnitudes, capable of holding the infinite reach of his thoughts. Past, present, and future. As the sun grew brighter, he began to weaken, until it was impossible to hold back the malign force of that other being, fighting for his soul. The daylight grew, until Malik felt his arms and legs being moved like a puppet, compelling him to inscribe a circle on the floor. Three full revolutions was all it took.

  When he stopped turning and opened his eyes, Vidor looked at the paintings and smiled. Ten sandpipers, and the camel caravan was gone. Now that Malik had been forced back into hiding, at least for the moment, he knew exactly what to do.

  61

  Gessen had waited until Vidor, still in the guise of Malik, though it was difficult to say, was safely aboard the train to Saint-Odile, in the company of two attendants from the clinic. Only then did he feel free to catch his flight to Copenhagen to discuss Vidor’s case. He wasn’t quite sure what to tell the authorities, though his goal for now was to buy Vidor more time. With Gessen’s original diagnosis in tatters, proving diminished responsibility in the death of Mr Nielsen would be difficult, if not impossible.

  Then there was the lingering issue of Vidor’s involvement in the death of Ismail Mahmoud. When questioned, he’d denied following Ismail into the copse of trees, even though Babette had later confessed she’d seen him. Had Vidor simply blacked out, or transformed somehow into the persona of Malik? Perhaps everything he claimed was a lie? If new evidence implicated Vidor in Ismail’s death, what could Gessen say in his defence? The fact that Vidor had tricked an attendant into removing his wrist monitor now flashed like an omen through the fog. And yet, after all this, Gessen still didn’t know what he was dealing with. Was Vidor – as Malik – someone to be pitied, a victim of the lingering effects of his childhood trauma, or was he a man with an unwavering mission, fully cognisant of his actions as he plotted a well-calibrated agenda of revenge? The man in Copenhagen mistaken for his monstrous father, and Ismail for the hated brother he’d tried so hard to leave behind.

  As he boarded the plane and stowed his bag under the seat, he felt oddly relieved to have shared with Malik some of the details of his own torturous history, even if it meant crossing a sacrosanct boundary to unburden himself to a patient. If nothing else, it might appear to an outsider as a macabre form of one-upmanship. You think your father was a monster? Well, listen to this. Before today, he’d not told his story to a single soul. Even Sophie, his oft-mourned love, had been spared. What would have been the point in tainting her with the horror of his father’s crimes? Malik Sayid might be one of the very few he’d met in his life who understood the cost of dragging a monstrous inheritance behind him.

  Though saying the words out loud would do little to relieve the crushing weight of his legacy, and the horrific acts perpetrated by his father. The man who’d given him life was none other than the commandant of a notorious Nazi concentration camp in Poland. Fuelled by his allegiance to a murderous regime, a man who’d orchestrated the deaths of some 900,000 men, women and children. Rounded up like swine, stripped of their dignity, gassed like vermin.

  And Gessen’s mother. How could she have stood by such a repellent creature? As a half-Jewish woman, registered as a Mischling, the Nazis’ insidious label to keep non-Aryans from government positions, how was it possible she could stand by as her own people perished? Those photos he’d found in his father’s desk as a child and been so charmed by. It was only later he understood that the eyes of the children were dead. Clouded by the foregone knowledge of the future that awaited them, as the clock ticked the minutes to the end.

  When he, as little Anton, had first opened his eyes, it was to the tremulous purple blossoms of the jacarandas lining their quiet street on the outskirts of Buenos Aires. Five years earlier, his father had deftly eluded his fate at Nuremberg by changing his name and boarding a passenger ship, with his pregnant wife and daughters in tow, to start a new life in South America.

  Of all this, Gessen knew nothing for years. Two days after his father was plucked off the streets and extradited to Germany, his mother fled with her son to Switzerland where she later left her six-year-old boy in the care of friends. Bewildered by the sudden loss of his parents, he’d been fed all kinds of lies by his adoptive family, that his father passed away from illness, and his mother died of grief.

  It was only later, while looking for his mother’s wedding ring to present to Sophie on bended knee, that he uncovered the horrifying truth. For months afterwards, he’d teetered on the edge of shock and horror, his innocence shorn away in a single blow. The loving father’s mask stripped off to reveal the sadistic grin and bloodstained hands.

  Dearest Sophie. How he’d loved her. So much so that the kindest thing was to send her away. What type of devil would wish to burden a wife – or a child – with such a past?

  In forty years, he’d found nothing to ease the pain. While the months in Asia, locked away in a Tibetan monastery, had provided a small measure of solace, he’d emerged to find that nothing had changed. The ghosts of the past would always be there, waiting to greet him wherever he went. The money he donated to a charity in Poland for survivors of the Holocaust did little to assuage his grief. No amount of self-recrimination, or good deeds, had the power to raise the dead.

  * * *

  Gessen lifted his travel bag from the overhead rack, ten minutes before the train pulled into the tiny station at Saint-Odile. He was anxious to get home after the onerous trip to Copenhagen to argue Vidor’s case, but the journey through the mountains seemed to take longer than usual. Each time he looked at his watch, the minute hand had scarcely budged. Darkness had fallen hours ago. Nearly nine o’clock and the patients would be in their rooms, the library and swimming pavilion shut, the clinic closed down for the day.

  When he’d spoken to Ursula after landing in Geneva, she assured him everything was fine. Vidor had chosen to take the evening meal in his room, but he seemed in good spirits. The other patients were where they should be, and all was quiet. ‘It’s so pretty right now,’ Ursu
la said. ‘The snow-covered chalets would look right at home in the window of a pastry shop.’

  ‘You’ll miss it when you’re gone.’

  ‘I will.’ Her voice was tinged with sadness.

  No more needed to be said about that. He told her he’d see her shortly, and after cutting the connection, he muted his phone and closed his eyes.

  As he entered the funicular and waited for Thierry to start up the engine, he rested his head against the seat. Tomorrow, or the next day, or whenever Vidor felt ready, they would begin again. He had managed to buy a little time with the public prosecutor in Copenhagen. Enough time, he hoped, to gain additional insight into Vidor’s case. In his heart, he suspected there was little he could do to save Vidor (and Malik, of course) from the consequences of his actions, triggered by a long-buried rage. But that wouldn’t stop him from trying. If he failed, Vidor would be arrested and tried for the wrongful death of Mr Nielsen. In the meantime, he faced some probing questions from the police about Ismail.

  It pained Gessen to accept he would have to face all of this alone. When he’d finally asked Ursula about her plans, she had told him, not without regret, that she planned to marry in the spring and move to Bern with her husband to set up a private practice of her own. They’d made a good team over the years and finding someone to take her place would not be easy.

  As they lumbered through the trees and slid through a narrow gap in the ravine, he sniffed the air. Was something burning? He stood and craned his neck to peer through the dirty window. A streak of orange glowed above the treeline and a column of smoke billowed towards the sky. Something was wrong. He urged Thierry to move faster, but the old funicular was agonisingly slow. He checked his phone and saw that Ursula had rung him four times. When he tried to reach her, she didn’t pick up.