These Dreams of You (25 page)

M
olly said, “Is he my father?” and Jasmine's jaw dropped. “No,” the mother answered, composing herself, “he's not.” The girl clutched the clipping, looking at her mother quietly. “He's not,” repeated Jasmine, “I would tell you.” Molly handed over the clipping and the book, and her mother took them, opened the book almost absently, regarding the drawing of her on the inside front page.

Now, only after Molly has run into the mouth of the U-Bahn does she realize that she has dropped the book at the side of the man in the street aboveground. At first she dismisses any possibility of going back for it. The skinheads might return, the police might come or the beaten man might die in her arms or, rousing himself to consciousness, hurt her in some rush of adrenaline. No, she concludes, she can't go back. She has but to step onto the train and be swept to the sanctuary of Berlin's tunnels before the last five minutes overwhelm her like a wave.

B
ut then she knows she must go back. The paperback she's dropped is one of life's markers, one of experience's receipts that may be destined to one day disappear; but not on this night, the sixteen-year-old decides, not in this way. Forget sentiment: Her mother's picture is in the book, which is to say that Molly has left behind identification; and before the doors close—the arc of the imagination bending back to the history it can't compete with—she steps from the train back onto the landing.

W
hen she gets back to him, the man lying in the road shows no signs of having stirred further. No one else is in sight. There's no sound of approaching sirens, responding to a witness' call; the paperback is in such plain view that she can't believe she didn't see dropping it. She tiptoes to the body, looking around furtively, then snatches the book from the ground.

She opens it and her heart stops.

T
he page with her mother's drawing is gone. The serrated edge of where it's been ripped from the binding is as fresh as if it were flesh.

Again Molly drops the book in the street. Again she looks around, for some single white leaf blowing in the breeze along the street, and when she doesn't see it, again she runs.

How many times, Molly frets herself nearly into hysteria in the U-Bahn, has she thought of tearing that page from the book herself? After all, the rest is only a damned
book
, an overstuffed frame for her mother's portrait; but exactly because it's such a frame, exactly because from the beginning it's provided the picture a context, she's never brought herself to remove the picture, and now it's too late.

W
hen she finds the page–or rather when it finds her mother–it's exactly in the way that Molly never wanted to see it again, there affixed to the consequences of her mistake. It's two years later, during which that page might reasonably be assumed decimated by time and elements, decomposed at the bottom of some heap, forgotten in any case by Molly and written off to blind and mindless panic, when she returns to her Schöneberg flat one afternoon and, as soon as she sees the police, she knows.

She cries, “Mum!” and dashes through the phalanx, none of the police able to muster the force necessary to stop her. The girl who's now eighteen gets to the top of the stairs and sees through the doorway only her mother's legs sprawled on the floor; only then, in contrast to the body of the beaten man in the Berlin street two years before, can she really claim she knows what lifeless is. She never sees the rest. A German officer swoops in to stop her and when he turns her in his arms, she accidentally kicks the crumpled paper at her feet on the top step and sees the wadded pencil portrait, dropped there not so much as a calling card but because to the six thugs who read it like a map, it was as useless to them as their target.

F
or Jasmine, mercy lies in the first blow from the six young men with shaved heads coming through her door, knocking most of the life from her and making the other blows superfluous.

After that, her last moments slow down and take on an altitude. Shock and pain fall away from her. Life fades fast from what it is about the woman that her assailants most despise, which is not her black skin: It's those white woman's gray eyes to which they believe she has no right. If she had the time to be surprised, she might be surprised that she doesn't think of Bob at all. She doesn't think of the night of the three mad fathers. If she had even more time to consider this surprise, she would realize it's not a surprise in the least: She thinks of her daughter. She prays, in the moment that she has to utter a prayer, not for herself but that her daughter doesn't return too soon.

It's all Jasmine thinks about, because this is the radio signal sent from maternity's ethiopia: We think of our children. If you believe in no god then you accept that we're so programmed by nature to think of our children in our last moments; if you believe in a God then you know She/He/It wrote the program in the first place. Jasmine hopes in the last moments for a blast of divine foresight, another radio signal from the future that tells her that her daughter will be all right. She doesn't get this. Probably nobody gets this. Probably like countries, all people get is hope, and odds no better than even.

F
or Molly, what mercy there is in Jasmine's murder lies in that the girl has only one mother to destroy, as she now is convinced she's done. She despises the music that comes from her, that lured back the Pale Flame on that night she dropped the book with her mother's picture. She wants to turn herself off.

When she flees Berlin for Marseilles, she doesn't flee for herself or for her own safety let alone self-esteem. She has a body that men notice and that she sometimes trades on; she leaves behind, with the nights whose stories they tell, the
tezeta
of her commerce—cries through the latticed balcony doors. Men pay for the moans as much as the flesh. They pay for the music, the songs that rise up through them as if the men become tuning forks when they're inside her. The woman means to flee anything that she deserves, the good and bad equally, because her existence has been rendered so nihilistic that she doesn't deserve to deserve. So she doesn't flee her remorse, as though she might watch it from a departing train, as remorse stands there in the U-Bahn station watching her back and growing smaller. Later it will seem like there's no other place to which she could have gone but the wellspring of all chronicled memory, back to abyssinian purity, as though there's no guilt in such a place or at such a point.

A
t the time that she takes it, the wandering journey from Marseilles to San Sebastian to Gibraltar to Algiers to Tripoli, she adamantly insists that in no way is it as though she's pulled there. The only thing she knows for sure when she finally arrives in Addis Ababa, a young woman at the dawn of what the western world calls the Twenty-First Century but for which Ethiopia exhausted numbers long ago, is that the last thing she deserves, the thing she deserves least of all, is to be a mother.

Am I a ghost? she wonders in her descent, following—into its labyrinth of tunnels and bridges, lined by high walls covered with moss—all the narrow, winding stone steps of her new abysmal city. Am I in an abyss of time, or one of space? Living on the outskirts of the eucalyptopolis nine years later, lying in bed she hears one night coming through the music of mosques and thunderstorms rolling in overhead a song she not only knows but was born of, and then a distant male voice in a familiar language that's not Amharic. Only after listening awhile does she acknowledge to herself that the transmission comes from her body. Not that it ever will really explain anything, she's picking up a radio broadcast from ten thousand miles away—
. . . for what happened last night . . . but then all the song says is that a change
will
come, not how fast, right? . . . and the really old-school one about the lovers at the Berlin Wall . . . who get to be heroes just for one day? That's for my four-year-old Ethiopian daughter, who I guess can't get enough of British extraterrestrials in dresses—
and months later in London, with Sheba asleep next to her in the dark, she still hears it, almost, or convinces herself she does, in the same way she's almost convinced herself she isn't dying.

In the dark between London and Paris, Parker doesn't like it when the train stops beneath the Channel. Reflexively he turns up his headphones, and his father in the seat across from him, who can make out the static of the robotic chooga-chooga from the music player around Parker's neck, says, “What are you listening to?”

S
eeing his father's lips move, Parker pulls the headphones from his ears. “What?” the boy says.
“What are you listening to?” says Zan.

“Why?” says the boy.

“I was just wondering,” Zan answers quietly. Parker remembers his dad taking him and his sister to that creepy underground bunker in London, and at the bottom the elevator doors opened to mannequins in cots; it was creepy, it creeped him out. It didn't matter that the bunker turned out not to be underground at all, it didn't matter if the whole thing was fake—it was creepy and now here on this train stopped in the dark, stuck under the flippin' ocean or wherever they are, Parker thinks it's like the bunker except worse. He looks around at the other passengers in the dim light and sees the dummies that he saw in the bunker. He sees one when he looks at his dad in the seat across from him; everyone on the train looks inanimate and stuffed, and Parker wants out and off. But he knows there's no getting out and off until the train moves and surfaces on the other side, wherever that is.

Zan feels his son slipping away. He's become aware of it since London, since Sheba disappeared, maybe since Viv disappeared, maybe before that. He says to Parker, “But when you like a certain song . . . ”

“What?” Parker shouts again with great exasperation, not bothering to remove the headphones this time. His father's mouth keeps moving and finally the boy turns off the music player around his neck. “What . . . ”

The father shrugs. “ . . . because it's catchy or—” and Parker snaps, “A lot of annoying songs are catchy.” At this point, Zan thinks, I should understand that music is about teen tribalism. At his son's age, musical taste is an act of revolution. Zan doesn't particularly like music that's political; the song he played the morning after the election—
but then all the song says is that a change
will
come, not how fast, right?—
only is political because it plummets into the personal and emerges as politics on the other side of confession. Yet Zan learned long ago from his teacher at the university who once was Trotsky's bodyguard and Billie Holiday's lover that music which isn't at least politically aware has nothing to say about anything, and that political people who are unmoved by music—whether it be rock and roll or Broadway tunes—aren't to be trusted.

In any case music isn't something over which a healthy twelve-year-old bonds with his father. Between a twelve-year-old and his father, music is the line in the sand. Out of those politics is born taste. Taste gets better but, Zan hopes, not perfect. When your taste is perfect, it's not yours.

W
hen Parker was four, the age that Sheba is now but before she was born, his father drove him to preschool one morning and they came to a place on the canyon boulevard where a truck had spilled oil that slicked the asphalt. Their car spun out and another car spun into them colliding, and when the spinning was over and everyone stopped, Zan turned from behind the wheel to the four-year-old in back and said, “Are you all right?” Yes, the boy nodded in his stoic fashion. If he nodded yes, whether he was really all right or not, or whether he even knew he was all right, then in his own four-year-old mind he took some small measure of control of the chaos that just had unfolded.

Arriving in Paris on the Eurostar after its unscheduled pause in the Chunnel, leaving the Gare du Nord and crossing the rue Dunkerque on their way to the Gare de l'Est, Parker sees the taxicab heading toward him not at all in that slow-motion way that everyone says things like this happen. There's nothing slow-motion about it; it all happens faster than the boy can compute before his father grabs him hard by the hand, so hard his hand crunches, and yanks him from the cab's path. His father says, “Are you all right?” and Parker nods as stoically as if he were four; but he's not all right. It's not just that his hand throbs. It's not even just the spectacle of the cab that nearly hit him flying into the limousine before it, then throwing the gear into reverse, then shifting into drive and slamming into the limo again.

E
veryone on the sidewalks watches the cab reversing and crashing into the limo over and over. Dimly through the back window, the cab's passenger grabs her head when she flies into the seat in front of her. At the age of twelve, Parker feels his first grown-up cognition of the fact that sometimes there is no exerting control. Sometimes everything loses control and there's nothing to be done about it, and things have been out of control for a while now—since before the Chunnel or London, maybe before Sheba.

Though he doesn't understand the details, Parker knows about the house. He knows about the money. He remembers one afternoon, back in the canyon, the panic in his father's voice when he hustled the kids into the car to drive down to the bank because Zan just had gone online to discover no money in their account, so he needed to make a deposit before checks started bouncing. Now his mother is missing, his little sister is missing, and though of course Sheba drives him crazy he can't help being upset that she's disappeared, as upset in his adolescent way as his father, and it's annoying, to be upset about Sheba. It just would be better if Sheba weren't missing because then things wouldn't be quite so out of control. Everything got harder in all their lives when Sheba came, the boy thinks—why wasn't I enough, why wasn't it enough for my mother and father to have
me
? Why was I so
not
enough that they had to go halfway around the world to bring Sheba to their house? and it will be half a lifetime before he understands it's never been that he wasn't enough, it's that his parents' love for him was so great as to set loose within them a terror more than they could bear.