Flicker (89 page)

“You see,” he said in a dry, wispy voice, “this time my ears are working. Our friends have been good enough to bring me batteries from civilization. I ordered them when you arrived. They came just a few days ago. Ordinarily, there is no need, you see.”

It was British English, not American. And too perfect. The sort of English a foreigner learns, though there wasn't the trace of an accent.

Too eagerly I rushed forward to shake his hand. “My name is Jonathan Gates… .”

“Yes,” he said, as if he knew as much. He gripped my hand limply with fragile fingers. Though my eyes were asking “And you … ?” he gave no answer. I pressed for his name. “You're … ?”

“… gard …”he mumbled. Something like that.

“Gardener?” I asked. “Mr. Gardener?”

“… gardener.” He gestured to the trees and shrubs.

“You're … the gardener?”

“Yes. The gardener,” he answered. And nothing more. The small, vague smile he wore began to take on a faintly idiotic contour. Was I perhaps dealing with a senile loony? He turned and led me into the shade of his front porch.

“Are you a prisoner too?” I hastened to ask.

He squinted straight ahead as if the answer might be written on the wall of his bungalow. “Prisoner?” He shook his head. “After all these years …”

“You want to be here?”

He gave a why-not? sort of shrug. “It is quite lovely … if you don't mind the heat. The heat is good for these old bones.” He walked beside me with a gimpy shuffle, still pondering my question. “No, not a prisoner. I wouldn't say so.” He spoke with a distracted air, slowly, unfocused. When we reached his veranda, he was breathing hard, ready to rest, but he insisted on offering me his one roughly made cane chair. There was a bowl of fruit on the table; beside it an earthenware jug. From the jug, with unsteady hands, he poured a pinkish juice into a small tin cup and nudged it toward me. “One chair, one cup. One of everything, you see. A solitary life.” He eased himself down into a crumpled sitting posture on the board floor,
leaned against the railing, and removed his hat from his sweat-beaded brow. “My children … I can't take care of them any longer. Poor things.”

Oh God, I thought, he
is
a loonybird. “Children?” I asked. He gestured widely out toward the orchard. He was talking about the trees. “My children. Soon they will all go wild. I have not the strength.”

“You planted all this? By yourself?”

His eyes narrowed, pondering. “Once there was someone… .” Then he fell sadly silent.

If he wasn't a prisoner, then my next question was, “Are you an orphan?” The words burst out, sounding too angry. An accusation.

He stared back at me a long while, then murmured distractedly, “Orphans. Yes. We are all orphans.
Born
orphans.”

“I mean Orphans of the Storm.
Sturmwaisen.
Are you one of them? Are you here to guard me?”

“No need of guards. Only those out there who never sleep.” He waved toward the sea. “You should be warned. Were you not?”

“Of what?”

He hinged his two hands at the wrist making a jaw-snapping movement.

“Sharks?” I asked. Walking the beaches, I'd several times seen what I thought to be fins moving out to sea. “Nobody told me. Nobody told me anything. I was abducted. Drugged, kidnapped.” I could hear the rising note of rage in my voice. I tried to throttle back. “I don't know where I am. Do you? Do you know where this is?”

He stretched out his emaciated arm and plucked a brownish-orange fruit from the bowl on the table. “This is …?” he asked, turning the fruit in his hand. Again, I began to fear he might be a crazy man.

“A fruit,” I answered. “A mango, isn't it?”

He held up an instructive finger.
“Mangifera ameranta.
A rare species. It thrives only within a narrow band of islands in the western Indian Ocean.”

He replaced the mango and gazed toward the horizon. “At night, the Southern Cross appears just there, very low. I believe we are somewhere near the Seychelles. That way … or that way. My teeth tell me about five hundred miles distant.”

“Your teeth?”

He opened his mouth wide to show me two higgledy-piggledy rows of decaying dentition. “Three times when I had a toothache, a doctor
came by seaplane. Also a nurse. I judge from the time involved—once it took them only a few hours to make the trip—that they are stationed somewhere nearby. Two hours by plane … five hundred miles? This is a sensible estimate, you believe? They don't always come so promptly. My advice: don't get sick.”

“But how did this doctor know you needed him?”

“There is a radio down by the jetty. The caretakers use it.” When he saw an eager look flash across my face, he cautioned me. “The radio is kept under lock and key. Always guarded. I did my best to get at it years ago. No success.”

“But the doctor—wouldn't he help you?”

“He was a priest from the church. The nurse was a sister. They were under orders to say nothing, except to ask where it hurts. Of course, each time they came, I appealed to them to let me go free. It does no good. But they have sent me books and other small favors.”

“Then you
are
a prisoner.”

“I have stopped thinking of it that way. A compulsory guest, I would say. Well cared for. I have no complaints.”

“How long have you been here?”

He shrugged. “No way to tell.” He smoothed the air between us with his hand. “Here the time, it is so flat. Like a desert. Endless sand. No landmarks. No way to tell the distance. We have no seasons. Nothing to count. Only day and night. Soon one loses track.”

I noticed that he didn't ask me for any better date than he may have had in mind. I volunteered the information. “It's 1976. July when I arrived.” But then I wondered: hadn't that been months and months ago? “Possibly 1977 now.”

He nodded, taking the information carefully into account. “I thought later than that.”

I asked, “What's the last thing you remember from the outside?”

“A war. There was a war.”

“Which war?”

“Have there been more since then?”

“Since when? Who was fighting?”

He smiled bitterly. “All the civilized nations. But not your people yet. The Americans. They had not gone to war yet.”

“Against whom?”

He knitted his face into a mock scowl, held three fingers slanted down over one eye like a lock of hair, held a finger of the other hand under his nose like a mustache. “Him.”

“Hitler? You're talking about the Second World War?”

“There have been more?”

“That was over thirty years ago! You've been here since then? My God! Have you ever tried to get away?”

He gestured to the sea, then again made jaws of his hands. “No way to escape. Believe me. It has been tried.”

“By whom?”

He pondered the memory deeply before he answered. “You aren't my first companion. There was a young German—younger than you. A student. Albrecht. Lovely fellow. We became great friends. He built a raft.” His voice trailed off as he remembered.

“What happened?”

He held out his hand and turned it in a slow flip-flop: the raft being capsized, I gathered. “There,” he said, pointing at the sea just off the nearest bit of shore. “The water turned red. The last of Albrecht.” Then, brightening, he added, “He was a great help with the garden … and other things.”

“Don't ships ever come?” I asked.

“We aren't on the sea lanes here. A few times small boats have come inside the breakwater. It's difficult to land anyplace else. Only passersby. The caretakers shooshed them away before I could cross the island.”

“Have there been others here—besides Albrecht?”

He nodded. “A Frenchwoman. She was my first companion. She was sent soon after the war. But she was quite ill. She didn't last long, poor thing.”

“The orphans let her die?”

“I think it was the caretakers' fault. They didn't send for the doctor in time. Perhaps they thought she was faking.”

I waited for his eyes to come back to me, tried to fix him, drill the question in. “Why are you a prisoner?”

“For the same reason as yourself,” he answered calmly.

I stared hard into his old, vague face. Almost afraid to ask, I asked nonetheless. “What do you know about me?”

He rose on unsteady legs and shambled into his bungalow, beckoning me to follow. I did. The building was smaller than I'd estimated, but extraordinarily cool inside. There were thick walls coated with a syrupy white plaster coating that held out the heat. As I'd seen from the outside, there was little more in the way of furniture than an easy chair, a table, a desk, a bed. But something I hadn't sighted through
the window took my eye at once: a bookcase, packed full, against one wall. I stared across at it hungrily. Books! Dozens of them. Little of what I could see looked new; many of the volumes bore antique bindings and had the appearance of non-English editions. Even so, I offered up a silent prayer of thanks. I'd have something to read.

The old man sank down at his desk wearily and pushed a mound of disorderly papers toward me. A few pages fluttered to the floor joining others there. It was a typescript, though I could see no typewriter in the room. The uppermost pages were filled with penciled notes along the margins and between the lines, a weak, crabbed hand too small to make out, though I could tell the words weren't English. The notes caught my eye before the text did. Then, looking across the pages, I realized. It was
my
work, a copy of my manuscript. There was the title page: “The Hollywood Years.”
My book. Here.
On this old codger's desk. Passages circled, scratched out, words underlined. His comments everywhere. In (now I saw) German.

I looked up. His eyes were on me.
“Auch ich wusste zu viel.”

And the truth collapsed on me with the force of a mountain. What should have been self-evident. The last thing I could have imagined. The unthinkable obvious.

When my head cleared, I found myself bent above the table, struggling to hold my knees solid under me. The daze couldn't have lasted more than a few moments, but it was time enough for him to cross and take me by the shoulders. Not that he had the strength to steady me. He walked me to his bed and sat me down. “I will make some tea,” he said soothingly and moved into a small adjoining room. Waiting, I found my mind subsiding into a comalike blankness. A hundred questions to ask but none I cared to voice. Instead, I felt only despairingly sick. For him. For myself. What I most wanted to do was to scream with sheer fury like a caged animal in useless protest. Thirty-five years he'd been here. Is that what they had in mind for me?
They.
Of whom I'd met no more than some half dozen face to face, the rest a shadowy throng I would never know. Who were
they
to do this to me?

When he returned, I asked, “Since 1941? Has it been all that time?” He nodded, handing me some lukewarm tea in the same tin cup. “How did you … can you stand it?” Asking the question, I felt the tears coming. Rage. Self-pity.

He reached out to stroke my shoulder, an authentically caring gesture. “The first five years are the worst. After that … it becomes
unreal. Of course, for me everything was at an end. Nowhere to turn. Why not here? I came to think of it as … retirement. Yes, a comfortable retirement. There was a great deal to keep me busy. The garden. It was already planted, but in need of much care. And the house—it was a wreck when I came. Albrecht helped me make repairs. And I found other ways to pass the time.”

His tired old voice had grown thick with a muzzy resignation that was starting to suffocate me. Perhaps he was prepared to accept his lifelong incarceration, but not me. It was absurd! “They wouldn't dare keep me here that long!” I blurted out. “Not for the rest of my …” And then choking on the words, I fell silent. At once my mind began to dart this way and that, contemplating escape. Not now, but someday. A plan would emerge as new opportunities presented themselves. The packet boat. I would find some way to swim out to it, hang from the anchor chain. Isn't that what people did in novels I'd read, films I'd seen? Hang from the … But what about the sharks? No. Fight my way on board. Steal the ship. Take off at full speed. Which way? Oh God, I had no idea about directions. For that matter, I had no idea how to pilot a ship. Hopeless.

Watching me, he must have read my thoughts. Again he patted my shoulder. “Perhaps one day you will find a way.” There wasn't much conviction in his words. “You have more reason than I.”

A pause set in, a silence of prisoners that might last forever. Finally, having nothing better to say, I asked, “Where did you get my manuscript?”

“It was sent. Soon after you arrived. By the next boat. I believe it was meant for you. The caretakers delivered it to me. I took the liberty… . Forgive me. I found it diverting. The first reading I've done in years. I've made some corrections, as you see. Things you couldn't know. It may amuse you.”

“Sent from where?”

“From New York.”

“By whom?”

“One of the brothers. He sends things from time to time.”

“Angelotti? Is that his name?”

“Brother Eduardo, yes. We've never met. You know him?”

“I know him. I'm here because of him.”

“Ah! And, I fear, because of me.”

“It's hardly your fault.”

“But you liked my movies so much. If you hadn't …”

“Yes, if I hadn't …”

He sighed. “Pity. They weren't very good movies, you know.” It wasn't false modesty. He meant what he said. I didn't feel like arguing the point. He mused on. “I never thought a day would come, these little amusements of mine would be studied so closely. Griffith, Eisenstein, I could understand. Dreyer …”