Charades (20 page)

He could be Nicholas, she thought again. It was as though she had been given a chance to unravel the great puzzle of her adolescence: here was Nicholas in a Petri dish. Freed of need and anguish, she could study him, work him out: a researcher's dream. How was it, why was it, that
afterwards
he was still a stranger who was always walking away? Why would he always be sitting, as it were, in a windowsill with his back
to her?

“Are you married?” she asked him.

He turned around, startled, as though she had broken the rules of the game. He seemed to consider not answering.

“Was,” he said curtly. “Big mistake.” He looked at her, just in case there were unclear boundaries. “Not something I'd do again.”

“You left her?”

“In a manner of speaking.” He tapped out his pipe, reaching for his jacket that was thrown across the chair, fishing in the pocket for the pipe-cleaning tool, scraping out that part of his life.

“Any children?” she asked.

He chose to ignore that question.

“I do,” she said. “Have children. Three. Two are teenagers, and the other's still in grade school.”

He looked at her, startled, then shrugged. “Rough,” he said. “Being a single mother.” As though he were well acquainted with the phenomenon. (She saw a ghostly trail of sex-hungry single mothers throwing themselves at him on trains, on buses, in the street.)

“Oh, I'm not a single mother,” she announced comfortably, propping herself up on the pillows and holding the sheet over her breasts. “I'm quite happily married.”

“God!” he said, shocked.

For some reason, it pleased her enormously that she had the power to disconcert him. “Yes. My husband's an academic. Well, so am I for that matter. My husband looks rather like you.
Quite
like you, actually. In fact, you could probably be mistaken for one another in certain lights. My husband wears corduroys. Smokes a pipe. That sort of thing. What kind of woman did you think I was?”

“I don't know,” he said embarrassed. “The usual kind, I suppose. Young career star, graduate student maybe, fast track, single or divorced.”

“Young?” she said, foolishly pleased. “Graduate student!”
Fast track,
she thought sardonically. She poked at it warily, this exotic view of herself.

“It didn't really matter what kind,” he said.

“Ah. All the nameless young women.”

“That's right.” He came and sat on the bed. He relit his pipe. She thought: He has to be doing something with his hands; and he looked at her as though aberrant behaviours had made them far more intimate than sex.

Then he said to the cheap framed reproduction above her head: “There's this crack in my life, I have to keep stuffing it with something … Like the little boy, you know, with his fist in the sea wall.” He walked to the window and back again. “Work or sex,” he said. “Either will do.” Words, explanations, seemed to be caught in his throat, they might choke him. “Today,” he said, coughing, “happened to be urgent.”

“Yes?” She leaned forward with intense interest. She felt as though she were on the verge of major discovery. “But why, Nicholas? Why?”

“Does the name Zundel mean anything?”

Katherine went spinning, spinning. She held onto the frame of the bed. Now she remembered what had summoned Nicholas from the dormant files of the past. She saw it again, the newspaper stand on the sidewalk in Front Street, outside the Royal Bank:

DID SIX MILLION DIE?

HOLOCAUST A HOAX, ZUNDEL SAYS.

MORE SURVIVORS GIVE TESTIMONY TODAY

“Naturally, it means something,” she said. “The trial, the anti- semitic crank.”

For a moment he looked startled. He looked as though she were privy to disconcerting private data on his life. He shrugged. “I forget everyone knows about it here. In Boston I have to explain.”

Katherine wrapped the sheet loosely around her body and swung her feet to the floor, dragging the bedding like a train.
She paced the room. Is coincidence possible? she wondered. “Do we somehow make things happen?” she asked him. “Do you think that's possible? Do we give off radio signals, or what?”

But he had settled into her space on the bed, except that he huddled more, and took one of the pillows in his arms.

“When I was a child,” Katherine said, “there was a girl in my school … Verity Ashkenazy, her name was. There were all sorts of stories about her. I didn't really figure things out till years and years later. Her parents both disappeared in the holocaust, but she herself, apparently, was hidden by nuns in a convent. She grew up Catholic, and then after the war —”

“My wife,” said the man on the bed, “gave testimony today. My ex-wife. At the Zundel trial.”

“I was in awe of her,” Katherine said, “She was older than me by several years. She was like … how can I explain? People said she was brilliant, but it was something else besides that … She'd been immunised against harm, nothing could touch her. There was something … she gave off something … She fascinated me.”

“My wife,” said the stranger on the bed, “was part of the group who laid charges.” He bent double across the pillow, as though stuffing it into some terrible pain, some gaping hole in his side. “She has nightmares whenever she relives it, nightmares, night terrors … you've no idea of the …” He puts his hands over
his ears.

“As a matter of fact,” Katherine said, “she changed my life. There was a certain kind of strength she gave me.” She looked at something in her cupped hands. “She fascinated everyone. But Nicholas most of all.”

“She sobs,” said the stranger on the bed. “She writes letters to dead people in France, in Le Raincy, that's where her family lived. Sometimes I think it's heroic and sometimes I think it's perverse.” He held the pillow to his face, blocking out the light. “I shouldn't have gone, but I had to be there. You can't leave, you can't abandon someone like that.”

“It's all right,” Katherine soothed. “It's all right, Nicholas.”

“In some ways,” he said, “she's a tyrant.”

“It's all right,” Katherine soothed. “It's all right.”

He began nuzzling her, sucking her, biting her impersonally. Ravenously. She might have been prison rations. Twisting into his need and her own, she unbuttoned his shirt and kissed the hollow of his neck. She kissed the star-shaped mole in the hollow of his neck.

When Katherine woke it was dark, and a stranger lay beside her in bed.

“Oh God,” she said, looking at her watch. “Oh my God.” Her arm was pinned under the stranger's shoulder.

First the tidal waves of lunacy recede, and then a most ghastly clarity is left in their wake. This is a physical law. She tugged her arm free.

“Wha-?” he mumbled. “What time is it?”

“It's after midnight,” she said. “Oh my God. My family will be frantic. I have to make a call.”

“Midnight?” he said. “Oh no, I've missed the last flight. Shit. I've got a class first thing in the morning.”

“A class?”

“I teach at MIT. I'm a physicist.”

“Oh no, not another academic. I seem to be doomed.”

“My apologies,” he said dryly. “I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name.”

Her hands, sliding over zippers and buttons, were beginning to tremble with anger. “It's Katherine Sussex,” she said tightly.

(Later, surprised, she wondered why her tongue had instinctively reverted to Sussex, why she hadn't given her married name.)

Above the pulling-on of his trousers, he smiled at her.

“Thanks for the lovely evening, Katherine.” Sardonic, but not insulting. He fastened his belt buckle and then held out his hand. “Koenig,” he said, “Actually, I'm the one who should be embarrassed.”

They shook hands.

Oh Nicholas, she incurably and foolishly thought, as the lamplight fell on his curls.

In the taxi, arranging and rehearsing versions and explanations, she saw again the moment at the desk: two strangers paying for several hours' use of a room, a meticulous sharing of costs. She saw the desk clerk's glance in her direction; it was a discreet but unmistakable smirk. She wanted to hit him. Where the smirk touched her, nausea sprang up like a weed. She was feeling queasy. The feeling grew rapidly worse.

“Excuse me.” She tapped the taxi driver on the shoulder. “Could you stop for a minute? I think I'm going to be sick.”

She had to hang onto the guardrail that ran between the shoulder of the 401 and the hulks, the bland and indifferent hulks of condominium towers.

“It was later that week,” she tells Charade, “that I wrote the advertisement for Verity and mailed it to the
Sydney Morning Herald,
the
Courier-Mail,
the
Age,
well, all the Australian papers. It wasn't because of Nicholas, really. Or only partly. It was the trial, you know, that made him appear. It was the trial that made me want to talk to Verity again.”

She shakes her head to clear it of muddle.

“I had quite a few crank letters in response to my ads. Some of them were really nasty. It's frightening.”

She sighs. “You think of Verity, you think of people like Zundel, you think of the hate letters, you have to ask yourself …” She looks at her hands, as though atrocities might lurk inside them. “You have to ask yourself …”

But she cannot formulate the question.

“I'd like to know where Verity is. I'd like to talk to her. Because wherever she is, she has answers.”

PART III

The 366
th
Night and Thereafter

1
The Kynge's Tale

2
The Tale of the End of a Marriage and of a Torrid Toronto Affair

3
A Tale of Hobnobbing with Poms

1

The Kynge's Tale

“Oh,” Koenig says.
“That
Katherine.” He rolls away from Charade and reaches for his robe and heads for the bathroom. There is a shuss of shower curtain hooks and the sudden noisy comment of water.

Charade follows, yanks the curtain to one side and calls over the water: “That Katherine. The one with a name.”

She hoists herself onto the vanity cabinet, the formica cool beneath her buttocks, and leans back against the mirror. She folds her arms, half closes one eye, and takes stock. It is not often that she has a chance to assess him naked. “Aunt Kay thought you were the sort of person who felt more himself in clothes. She's right, isn't she?”

Koenig doesn't hear, or chooses not to.

“Which is curious,” she says, “given your continuing reputation as a womaniser. In the dorms, that is. And dating from pre-Me, I'm assuming. I realise I don't exactly leave you much time to —”

He reaches up and turns the shower head dial to full blast massage and subjects himself to the battering, though no force is likely to drown out that Toronto day, the trial testimony, the photograph of women and children, including the little girl, Rachel (he puts it into clear unassimilable thought: “my ex-wife, Rachel”) all of them, in the photograph, abstract as geometry: nothing but lines and angles, their ribs clear as graphed paper. He shuts his eyes and lets the water pound on his lids but the photograph is always there, an arrangement of parallel lines: barbed wire and bones. The photograph grows and grows the way things in nightmares do, it expands infinitely, projected onto the courtroom screen, and from the witness stand his ex-wife's voice says, “There. That's me,” as flatly as though she were pointing to a souvenir snapshot taken in front of the Schonbrunn Palace. Everyone looks, the entire packed gallery is watching, there are thousands of people staring at one small naked girl whose hands clasp themselves pathetically in front of her pubic triangle; it is so undefended that all the clothes of the rest of her life won't cover it. And then Rachel looks up into the gallery where he hides behind a pillar and dark glasses and several other bodies. She looks right through him. He is frantic to get out of the courtroom, to stuff his senses with anything, anything: the first second of the universe, the first equation in time, the first woman he sees …

“Do you know,” Charade says, cocking her head to one side, “this is the longest stretch of time I've seen you naked? I've never known anyone dress so quickly afterwards.”

He is soaping himself the way he does everything else: meticu­lously, and in graphable patterns. It fascinates her: the way he moves the soap from ankle to thigh in a series of parallel lines. Then, round the genitals and working up to the neck, he follows the behaviour patterns of particles within waves: the endless little circles wheeling on, the cogs and rollers and flywheels of perpetual motion going nowhere. Lather is growing luxuriant along his limbs, spreading, foaming, a white fungus, and he turns with a kind of precise delicacy so that the shower water bounces only off the unlathered parts.

“You look like a birdman,” she says. “Or a faun or something.”

Her comments fall into the well of his absorption, or it could be soapy anger that he sets between them. He is obstinate as a mathematical formula, she thinks; a closed system. A glint comes into her eye. She stretches and slithers; one bare tanned leg, serpentine, follows her pointed toe down the front of the vanity, across the floor, and over the lip of the bathtub, the rest of her undulating after it.

In Koenig's hand, the mathematically minded cake of soap pauses, continues, muddles a pattern of perfect arcs across his chest, pauses. Acrobatic Charade, steadying herself with one hand against the tiled headwall of the tub, fingerpaints (or rather, toepaints) a wavering line through the foam from sternum to navel to crotch, which she is circling in slow toe-wiggling exploration when the soap slips like a fish from his hand and he grabs her ankle.

“Brat,” he says. His tone is not angry, and not playful either. It is almost as though he were speaking of himself; or naming, with considered exactitude, some act of blasphemy. For a second he holds her ankle away from himself, forestalling her, forestalling whatever inevitability he reads in the soapsuds. Then they slither together like wet seals.

Perhaps it is the exhilarating pummelling of the shower; or perhaps it is the way his wet hands move over her — as though she were a woman without a name — that makes Charade toss words into the spray, words that are possibly playful, possibly not. “You know,” she says, “in a few more years, you'll be an authentic Dirty Old Man. It's so easy to turn you on, it's
a joke.”

This gets under the edge of his abstraction. When he flinches, she can feel the scrape along the length of his pride, practically see the pinpricks of blood. Whatever it is that follows — a spasm of shock or of anger — can be measured by the strength with which he hoists her up onto the side of the bathtub. “Is that … the name … of the game?” he demands, jerkily, rhythmically, coming at her like a jackhammer. “Humiliate the dirty old man?”

“Maybe.”

He comes. She comes. The room is full of vapour. He turns off the shower, steps out, pauses. Charade sees his face.

I don't care, I don't care, she tells herself. Nothing reaches him. (“Believe me, Charade,” a girl in the MIT dorms has told her sourly. “There's a steady line through his office. The man is an animal.”)

She does not believe the girl. She does not want to believe the girl, who may have an axe to grind. When would Koenig have time? But still, she thinks; but still, he could snap his fingers and forget I exist.

Nevertheless she has to turn away. It is true, there is something disturbingly vulnerable about him naked.

With a little flurry of movement, he turns the faucets on again, full blast, steps back into the tub and stands directly in the line of greatest force. He could be trying to scrape off a layer of skin. When he sees Charade's eyes, he pulls the shower curtain across. Relentless, not even knowing why she does it, she jerks it back again and shuts off the drumming voice of the water.

“All right,” he says quietly, resigned, exhausted. “All right,” he says, his back against the wall. “What is all this about?” He might be a prisoner in the dock. “Some kind of feminist revenge? A message from Katherine in Toronto?”

“Don't be silly. She doesn't even know I'm here. To her, you're incidental, an illusion, a freakish manifestation of the — Hmm,” she says, touching the mole in the hollow of his neck. “I wouldn't call it star-shaped exactly. And I wrote to Mum, you know, to ask her if Nicholas had a star-shaped mole, or any mole for that matter, in the crook of his neck. And she wrote back:
Bloody rubbish. Not a mark, not a blemish. One of Kay's stories again.
So who, I wonder, has the star-shaped mole?”

“Why do I suddenly have the distinct feeling that all the stories were leading up to some kind of attack?” He is towelling himself dry now, first gingerly (the way an invalid pats at his bruises), then with increasing and furious energy.

“How come,” Charade demands, “that some people who've given themselves the Gold Star Tragic Experience Award think they have a right to live rottenly ever after? Why do they think they've got some kind of licence to treat the rest of the world as shit?”

He holds the towel perfectly still in front of himself, a shield, and stares at her. At last he says, “My daughter sent you.” He announces it as fact. Puzzle solved. (He can see his daughter's eyes as he stands and pushes past people's knees, makes it to the aisle, walks from the courtroom with as much tact as he can manage, willing himself not to run.) “Prick him and see if he still bleeds.”

“Rubbish. You told Aunt Kay your name was Koenig, and you taught at MIT. If you hand out calling cards, what do you expect? I wanted to see if you really existed. I thought she might have made you up.”

“Ah. We're back to Aunt Kay.”

“Whose name you didn't even remember.”

“I had a lot on my mind,” he says irritably. “I barely knew what I was doing that day. It wouldn't have mattered who she was.”

“Exactly.” She whisks his damp towel out of his hands and holds it between finger and thumb, at arm's length: contaminated material. “It wouldn't have mattered
who
she was. And does that happen to you often?” She drops the towel into the open toilet bowl.

“What did you do that for?” For whole seconds he contemplates the problem, a formal arrangement of porcelain hemisphere (white) and acute-angled towel (plush brown) — an equation whose solution eludes him — and then wearily fishes out the towel and stuffs it into the laundry hamper. But something about the dripping trail of water it leaves across the bathroom floor energises him. He is certainly angry now. First there is the slam of the toilet seat, which makes Charade jump, then the savage way he opens and shuts the medicine cabinet, dresses, yanks at his belt buckle. She is excited, she is made
perversely hopeful, she is aroused by this show of agitation.

“Oh yes,” he says, “of course it does. Of course that sort of thing happens all the time.” (Thickly now, laying it on in heavy strokes.) “A virgin a night, before you hung around so persistently.” (So many available virgins? Careful. This sort of thing betrays his age.) “One undergraduate girl per night,” he says savagely. “I had them served up.”

“So I hear.”

“Oh for God's sake.” It is not possible, he is thinking, to translate middle age to youth, or horror to those who have not felt it, or a war to those born after it. “Anyway” — he resigns himself to speaking in a second language, one they can both understand, one stripped of complicated nuance — “anyway, as for the Katherine in Toronto … She practically threw herself at me.”

“She thought you were Nicholas. She explained that.”

“Did she? It so happens that I don't remember. It was the day of the trial …”

A procession is winding its way through his head: Zundel and his coterie of hardhats. He stares at the fleshy faces, smug, confidently right, smiling beneath the yellow domes of their helmets. They might be colonists from Uranus, one of the dark cold lifeless planets. He envies them and hates them for their bovine certainties. For them indeed — you can read it in their faces — for them there was no holocaust; it didn't touch them and therefore it didn't happen. He hates the way they stay calm in court, confident that the riders in subway cars, the readers of tabloid newspapers, the people in the street, the vast and eternal subterranean currents of prejudice, are with them; while the survivors in the witness stand grow shrill in spite of themselves.

Charade says: “According to Rachel Koenig's testimony — I looked it up in the trial records — she didn't come from Le Raincy at all. Her family were Austrian Jews.”

He looks at her blankly.

“So why,” she asks, “did you tell Aunt Kay it was Le Raincy?”

“What? How could I have told her that? That's your aunt's invention. A lot of it is her invention. That wasn't the way it happened.”

“Why would she make up a detail like that? What would be the point?”

“I've never even heard of Le Raincy.”

Charade sighs, “Well, I guess this is the end of the trail.”

“Meaning what? Why are you getting dressed?”

She raises an eyebrow, tugs at the tail of the shirt he is engaged in buttoning. “Listen to who's talking,” she says. “I'm leaving.”

“What do you mean, leaving? It's early. It's only eleven o'clock, we haven't had our brandies, you haven't told tonight's —”

“I'm
leaving.”

He knows perfectly well what she means. From the start he has been convinced she would disappear again as mysteriously and suddenly as she appeared. This is a given. He has never believed he has any power to influence the course of events. What image billows up out of the word
leaving
? Answer: the hollow image of his future, a long long tunnel, the infinity corridor, curving back to the first second of unrecorded time, furnished or over furnished, by way of compensation for other starkness with comfortable mathematics. But these are the rules of the game: one always plays as though it were possible to win. And so he says, both hopefully and hopelessly: “But I've bought a jazz record, the one you mentioned, the Wynton Marsalis — and all day at the back of my mind I've been waiting to find out … especially now that I find I've
met
her. I mean, how did Katherine end up in Canada? And when? And why?”

“Typical,” Charade says, “of the quantitative mind. Seize on the boring and irrelevant facts and don't let them go. Of course there are hows and whys for Katherine, but that's another story. Another story altogether, another cycle, another book. It has nothing to do with
my
story. Anyway,” she says again, with an extra edge of petulance in her voice: “I'm leaving.”

(Because why should he skip right over “leaving”? Why should he react so mildly? It's an affront the way it barely causes a ripple in his evening. Why should it be so easy? — a mere inconvenience for him, before someone else, whose name he will not remember, takes her place.)

Nothing I say, he tells himself forlornly, is going to make any difference. Someone else has written the rules. But he asks, as though he does not already know the answer: “Do you mean
leaving
leaving, or just leaving early?”

“I mean leaving leaving. This is it. I'm off.” She has of course no serious intention of leaving if she can help it, she most certainly does not want to leave. But whatever this is, this overwhelming inertia that keeps her from moving on, or from moving back home, whatever it is (and she most certainly does not believe in love, an outmoded, a bourgeois, a pre-feminist and colonising and ludicrous Romantic idea), whatever it is, why does it have her throwing tantrums and behaving like a fretful child? Passion is an illness, she thinks. Love (hypothesising for the moment that it exists) is cruel, is hell, is like shedding a layer of skin. Love stinks.