‘That’s all!’ She was incredulous.
‘That’s all.’ The sadness in that voice! Marianne was too young to recognize the components of that emotion—aching love and a piercingly sweet renunciation—but she could not miss the sadness. ‘Oh,’ the voice went on, with tears in it, ’except one thing. When you are about twenty-one or -two, maybe a little older than that, you may meet a man. His name is Makr Avehl. He comes from Alphenlicht, like I—like we do. He may know all about this. About Harvey, everything. He’s—he’s a very – well, he’s a very good friend of ours.’
‘Do you—do you love him?’ In the vision, it seemed appropriate that she should love him.
‘He saved my life. He loves me,’ the voice said sadly. ‘I do love him. I don’t know if you will or not.’ It went away then. Purposefully and absolutely, as though some tenuous line that had tied it to this Marianne had been deliberately severed and the connection between them had been broken. Young Marianne knew that grown-up Marianne was gone. Not merely elsewhere, but gone. There were no longer two, but only one. If the other Marianne had been correct about Madame and about Harvey, no one knew it now except young Marianne herself. And perhaps the man. Makr Avehl. If he were real and not merely part of the dream.
‘Mack Ravel,’ she said to herself, already forgetting the name. ‘From Alphenlicht.’
Time went on. The motionless body that was Harvey came home from the hospital with two attendants and a wheeled litter. His attendants said he could see well enough. He could even signal yes and no by blinking his eyes, though he seemed to do so only in response to questions concerning food or temperature. Would he like more ice cream? Was it too warm? The eyes would blink – once for yes, twice for no. If one asked anything unrelated to food or temperature, ’Would you like to go out on the lawn, Harvey?’ there was no response at all.
Sometimes she would come into a room and find him parked there, just lying, looking at her. Sometimes she saw something in his silent stare that could not really be there, something smoldering, like flame beneath a pile of ashes. She told herself it was only because she needed to see something rather than this vacancy. In reality, everyone said there was nothing there. The doctors agreed. The body lived, but whatever had been Harvey within it did not.
Seeing him thus helpless, unmanned, dehumanized, converted into something that was kept alive only out of a conventional sense of the appropriate, made her former belief in the immediacy of danger seem remote and unlikely. The precarious world of her dream-threat faded; her conviction went with it. She did not really believe in it. Belief in the momentary gods departed. She did not think they had really existed, either. By the time she was fourteen, fifteen, she knew that none of it had been real. The accident had been only an accident. There had been dogs. Only dogs. The rest was woven out of fairy tales and too much imagination and an overbred sense of guilt. Her childhood had not really been as she remembered it, all known ahead of time. There had not really been a grown-up Marianne in her head. All those double visions of things had not actually happened. They had resulted from some kind of juvenile nervous disorder, now outgrown. She did not tell herself it would never happen again. She merely thought of it as an aberration, one she could handle.
All her memories shifted, changed, underwent a softening as she told herself what she had thought was real had been only a childish imagination.
Until at last there was nothing left at all. Except, from time to time, a feeling of formless guilt. Try though she might to tell herself that it had only been an accident, something inside accused her of being responsible for Harvey’s condition. His silent body became ubiquitous, a constant accusation. He seemed to inhabit every room of the house simultaneously. He and the litter were inseparable, half living, half mechanical, not a life but an accusatory device. She twisted beneath the pressure of guilt, feeling it a burden that she longed to shift away from herself.
Who had done it really?
That other Marianne who was only a fiction? Fictions cannot be responsible for anything.
Was there a real person involved in all this? She would wait and see. If there was, that person was surely responsible for whatever had happened. If anything had happened.
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ some childish part of her continued to insist. ‘I didn’t do anything. If anybody did anything at all, they did it.’
Time went. School went. Out of her love for her horse and her interest in animals of all kinds, out of her devotion to the vast acres that Papa Zahmani had said one day would be hers, she had studied agriculture and livestock and business management, knowing she would have to prove herself to Papa before he would let her, a woman, manage the estate with its huge stables of thoroughbreds and its herds of pure-bred cattle. Papa would never have considered her if Harvey had been well and able, but Harvey wasn’t. Guilt bit at her again, but she shrugged it off and went on with her studies.
The University went. There was a love affair, sweet and intense and sudden as a summer shower, over as soon, leaving Marianne wondering what she had seen in a particular egotistic, not very interesting, and totally predictable young man. With encouragement from Mama, she decided to forget him by visiting the land of her forebears. She spent several happy weeks among the small villages of Alphenlicht, picking up a little of its language and learning of its customs, no stranger to her than others she had seen in places far closer. When she read of the Prime Minister of the country, Makr Avehl, it was with a sense that she might have read or heard the name before, but it made no particular impression. The papers said he was on his way to the United Nations in New York. There was another dispute between Alphenlicht and neighboring Lubovosk. Madame Delubovoska had asserted a right for Lubovosk to govern the lands of Alphenlicht. The Prime Minister ridiculed these specious claims. The matter would be heard before the General Assembly. Reading of this, Marianne experienced a tremor of recollection, as though, after a long detour, she had come once again upon an old, well-traveled road. The sensation lasted only for a moment. Real memories did not form; no voice spoke.
She went home again. It was time to get on with her life, Time to take a job. Time to become herself.
She waited, deciding among several job offers, spending a lot of time riding to use up recurrent spasms of nervous energy. She felt she should be doing something, fighting some battle, accomplishing some task she could not define even for herself. Something. Something quite remarkable.
Until the afternoon she rode up to the house and found Papa and Mama on the terrace, entertaining a tall, spectacularly handsome man. She had seen his picture often in Alphenlicht. She recognized him with disbelief, wondering what had brought him here, accepting the introduction to him as she would to any total stranger.
‘And you are Marianne,’ said Makr Avehl.
She, wondering what he was doing here, gave him her usual glowing smile, which he misinterpreted at once.
During dinner they exchanged only pleasantries, slightly formally as was consistent with their just having met. Great-aunt Dagma gave them both a long, level look through her glasses but said nothing. Marianne felt herself flush under that look and resented it. When dinner was done, he asked her to walk with him in the garden.
‘Marianne,’ he said to her as soon as they were out of sight of the terrace, drawing her close to him. ‘Oh, by all that’s holy, my Marianne.’
‘What in hell!’ she exclaimed, breaking away from him and turning as though to flee, stopping only at his shout of half pain, half dismay. She was angrier than she could have thought possible. ‘I don’t know you,’ she grated at him. ’What do you think you’re doing?’
He stood there, trembling, unable to speak, staring at her, searching her face for the woman he remembered. In his own memory, he had left Marianne only days before—or rather, had been left by her – in a strange, sorcerous world she had helped to create. She had left him there, but he had found her again—except that he seemed to have found a different woman.
‘Accept my apology,’ he said from an agonized throat. ‘I truly thought – never mind what I thought. Forgive me. Pretend it didn’t happen.’ He turned away, then back to her as though he could not leave her and she responded to the pain in his face as she had not to his importunity. ‘Walk with me,’ he said at last in a voice aching with loss, needing to move before he froze into place, turned into ageless ice by this grief he felt.
She wanted to refuse him but could not do so without being ungracious. He had obviously made a mistake. Perhaps he had known someone else by her name, someone with the family resemblance. He, himself, might have been her father’s son or younger brother. She had no wish to be rude, though she could not help being angry. The latter was understandable, but the former was beneath her. So Cloud-haired mama often said. So she thought. He was not being demanding. A little resentfully but graciously enough she turned to walk beside him on the path while he examined her face as though it had been a holy icon of his religion.
‘You really don’t remember?’ he asked in a voice pathetically pleading for such a big and powerful man. ‘You really don’t?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Excellency.’
‘There was—there was another Marianne. Your twin. You, in another world. She—I… I loved her very much.’
She softened at his tone. It would have been impossible not to. One would not kick the victim of an accident, someone lying broken on the road. So, she could not kick at him emotionally when he was so obviously broken.
‘It’s odd you should speak of another Marianne,’ she murmured. ‘When I was a child, I sometimes thought there was another Marianne. Although I know now it was only hallucination, it seemed then I had a grown-up twin, in my head, somewhere. An older self. At one time I bothered myself a lot trying to figure out whether she was real.’
‘What if I told you she was?’
Wary, she responded, ‘I don’t care. It wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I seem to remember that from the time I was about five until about twelve, there was a voice inside me, a kind of prompter. It may have been imaginary. At the time, it seemed to tell me things. Things that were going to happen.’ A sudden and unexpected memory assailed her. ‘It told me your name.’
‘Yes,’ he prompted.
‘It’s hard to… think of that time.’
‘The voice told you about your half brother, and Madame Delubovoska?’
She looked at him in shock, suddenly awash in memory, long repressed. She gasped. It had not occurred to her he would know what the voice had said. How could anyone in this real world know what her own delusions had spoken of? She dithered, muttering, ‘Some things about them, yes. I’d rather not think about that, if you don’t mind.’
The guilt that haunted her from time to time was manifest in her voice, and he reached out to her. ‘Let me verify what the voice told you.’
‘Your Excellency, I’ve dealt with that. I’ve forgotten it. I don’t want to hear.’
‘You must hear. There’s pain in your voice. Whatever happened, you feel involved. Your involvement bothers you. In this world, your act, whatever it was, does not seem to be self defense. It must seem to you to be almost gratuitous violence. Your generous nature would repudiate such violence. It would revulse you. What can I say to counter your revulsion if not to tell you what you did was justified?
‘In my world, that other world, the one you don’t remember, there was a girl named Marianne Zahmani. She called her mother Cloud-haired mama. Her mother died when she was thirteen years old. No one knew why. No one could find out why or how except that she seemed to have choked to death. About a year later, Marianne’s father died. Again, no one knew why or how. Both of them seemed to choke to death, but the doctors couldn’t find any reason for it. Marianne’s half brother was left as Marianne’s guardian and as executor of Marianne’s estate. My sister believes he may have tried to seduce her sexually when she was still only a child; certainly he did everything in his power to bend her to his will, to destroy her spirit. Finally, when he had diverted most of her inheritance for his own purposes, he decided to kill her.’
‘No,’ she snarled at him. It wasn’t fair for him to drag this dream stuff out into the light. ‘I don’t want to know…’
‘You have to know. He decided to kill her. He tried to kill her as he killed her mother and his own father, he and his aunt, Madame Delubovoska. They used—well, call it sorcery. I came along and spoiled things for them. So, they removed her from my influence. See – I do not say “you,” I say “her.”’ He paused, struggling with the word. He said it. He still could not accept it. ‘They took her into another world, a false dream world. I pursued her there, with Aghrehond, Marianne’s friend, Aghrehond. We helped her escape into still another world, one of her own. Madame and Harvey followed her there. So did my friend, so did I. She escaped again, back into her own past. Working with herself as a child, with you as a child, somehow she has changed things.’
Marianne turned away, angry once again. He was bringing it all back, all the confusion and pain, giving it reality, status. ’I’ll assume for one moment you knew some other Marianne though I don’t believe it. I’ll assume it for your sake, because you believe it. If this woman mixed into my life, she had no right to. I’ve thought it over and over. Doing that to a child is like molesting a baby. Childhoods should be sacrosanct. Children have a right to innocence, to discovery! Assume she reached back into her childhood, assume that. Well, it was my childhood she ruined. Destroyed.’ Her voice burned with the disinterment of a long-buried resentment. ‘She did it to me.’
She heard her own voice in disbelief. Did she really believe this nonsense? ‘That is, she – she did it to me if she existed. I don’t really believe she did.’
He stared at her with a skeptical look. ‘Would you rather have seen your parents die?’
‘I have only your word for that. And hers. How do I know that’s true?’
‘You have my word,’ he said stiffly, almost angrily. ‘What Makr Avehl says is true is true.’
‘So you say. In this world it didn’t happen. Or perhaps it never happened. Perhaps the whole thing is illusion, a shared illusion between you and her. I don’t know. I don’t pretend to know. I don’t want to know.’
‘But she talked to you!’
‘Someone seemed to, yes, Makr Avehl. Then. The last thing she said to me was that you might come. And that she loved you.’ She told him this reluctantly, but in a sense he was owed at least this.
‘Love me. Oh, Marianne, to hear that you love me…’
‘No, no,’ she waved him away, hands out, voice hostile. ’She. Not me. She. The other Marianne. A ghost. A dream we shared, perhaps. She doesn’t exist. I wish you could agree with me that she probably never did.’
It took him some time to control himself, but he did. When he turned toward her again it was with a stern, calm face.
‘Tell me what happened to your half brother?’
She told him what she had decided to remember. ‘An accident, that’s all. I think there was a pack of dogs and an accident.’
‘A pack of dogs?’
‘At the time I thought they were something else,’ she laughed. ‘I called them momentary gods. I was very confused as a child.’
He shook his head, staring into the distance, not looking at her because it was too painful to do so, musing almost to himself. ‘So. She was thoughtful of you, Marianne. You didn’t actually have to do anything, did you? There is no need for you to feel guilt. She did it, not you. She had it all arra
nged through the momentary gods. When it was all over, how did you dismiss them?’
‘I’m sure they were imaginary. They dismissed themselves. Things we imagine as children disappear when we become older.’
He became very pale, though she could not see it in the equally pallid light of the cloud-shifted moon. ‘Did she? The – my Marianne. Did she dismiss them?’
‘I have no idea. Funny. My Great-aunt Dagma had something to say about dismissing gods. I’ve forgotten what it was.’
His voice was tense. She disliked the sound of it, the way it made her feel. Something inside her responded to his tension with a twanging discordancy of its own. ‘And what about Harvey’s aunt?’ he asked. ‘My cousin Madame Delubovoska? Have you seen her? Heard of her?’
‘Nothing. She called when she heard Harvey had been hurt. She sent flowers to the hospital. I remember Mama calling it “conventionalized concern.” She never came to see him.’
‘He was of no more use to her then. Which doesn’t mean she may not still be very interested in your family, Marianne. And in you.’
‘Why? She’s no kin to me. To Papa’s first wife and to Harvey, yes, not to me. What possible reason could she have to be concerned with me?’
Makr Avehl could think of at least one very good reason, and he started to tell her but she wasn’t listening to him. She was wondering, at that moment, whether he and the other Marianne had been lovers. Her own prurient curiosity offended her, and she answered his comment with annoyance. Something about the family fortunes. ‘I know very little about Papa’s affairs,’ she said coldly. ‘It certainly isn’t something I should discuss with someone who is virtually a stranger.’
He was silent for a long time. Their feet made parallel tracks across the grass, wet with evening dew. The scent of flowers blew into their faces. Behind them the lights of the house fell across the paved terraces in long, elegant fingers of colorless light.
‘If I tell you you are in danger, you will not believe me,’ he said at last, rather stiffly. ‘You are not the woman I loved, not the woman who loved me. And yet, you are.’ He stared at her. ‘Perhaps there is someone else in your life?’
Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods Page 4