The Sisters

by Robert Littell

  "You should always cry over spilled milk," the Potter told her. "Spilled coffee also, if it seems appropriate. "

  "Peter called him Walter too," she noted. She nibbled nervously at a fingernail.

  "I beg your pardon."

  She looked up quickly. "Peter always referred to Whitman as Walter, the way you did a moment ago."

  "That was his name, Walter. Walter Whitman."

  The woman shook her head. "Everyone calls him Walt. He called himself Walt."

  The Potter lifted his shoulders in a vague shrug.

  "He's left, you know," the woman said. Her body was just across the table, but her voice seemed to come from far away. "Forever. He s not coming back."

  So he had arrived too late. "Did he tell you that?" the Potter asked, a note of desperation seeping into his tone.

  She shook her head once, angrily. "He didn't have to. It was evident. He took his copy of Whitman with him. Walt Whitman, It's probably the only thing-the only material thing-he really gave a damn about." She studied the Potter from the depth of her sunken eyes.

  "Here's the thing. He talked about a teacher he once had, someone who was tied up to the pier of old age. I never forgot that phrase. He talked about someone who made him think he was on a crusade. He said his teacher was an amateur potter with powerful forearms and hands. She reached across the table and ran the tips of two fingers along the Potter's forearm. Her touch was so light it made him shiver. "He talked once about showing the mosaics of a church to someone, and driving out to the countryside to visit his father with someone. If he told one story, he told a hundred. And I understood, although he never said so specifically, that these weren't different someone's, but one someone.

  He even described, in great detail, making love to the wife of someone."

  Her eyes flashed up. "I was a fool to tell you that. Maybe you didn't know it."

  The Potter couldn't bring himself to speak.

  "My name is Kaat," she said to change the subject. She spelled it for him.

  "What kind of name is Kaat?" he asked.

  "It's my maiden name," she explained. "I was married once, when I was nineteen. I got divorced a year later. I didn't want to wear the name of a man I didn't live with, didn't love, so I went back to my own name. My first name I detest. So I call myself by my maiden name, Kaat. Everyone else does too." She smiled at a memory. "The first time I told Peter about Kaat being my maiden name, he said something that made me wonder who he really was."

  "You wondered who he was?"

  "My maiden name reminded him of someone else who went by her maiden name, a woman called Krupskaya. She was Lenin's wife. Nobody called her Nadezhda, which was her first name, or Mrs. Lenin. They called her Krupskaya. But you know all that, don't you?" She smiled across the table at him, and the Potter noticed, for the first time, that she had a way of smiling with her mouth and taking it back with her eyes. "Admit you know who Krupskaya was," she insisted. She pulled the coffee cup closer and tried to see her reflection in the muddy liquid. "There were things-little things-that gave him away."

  All those months, those years, of creating a legend; of piling up details, as if they were bricks, until they constituted an impressive building; of training the Sleeper to fit inconspicuously into a society, the Potter thought. And this girl comes along out of nowhere and sees right through him. "What do you mean, gave him away?" he asked, and was astonished to recognize in his own voice a note of professional curiosity. He had thought he was through with all that.

  "More coffee?" the waiter called over from the counter. The Potter waved a finger no.

  "He never drank coffee," Kaat remembered. "He drank tea, and once, when he thought nobody was around, I caught him straining it through a sugar cube clutched between his teeth. Russians do that, don't they?" She tilted her head and angled up her chin, as if challenging him to contradict her. "Peter was Russian. I bet you are too."

  The Potter could either deny it and lose her, or admit it and use her.

  She knew the Sleeper had left. She knew him well enough to sense that he had left for good. Maybe she knew where he had gone. The Potter drew a deep breath. "His name was Piotr Borisovich Revkin."

  "And who are vou?"

  "I was the teacher. My name is Feliks. Feliks Turov."

  Across the table, Kaat pressed her eyes shut, obviously relieved, then opened them and for lack of anything more original to say fell back on the standard formula for meetings, "How do you do?"

  "How do you do," the Potter replied, inclining his head formally, and he remembered Piotr Borisovich exploding into laughter during one of their early sessions on the top floor of the military hotel and sputtering: What a curious thing to say when you meet someone-how do you do?

  "Now that you've told me this much," Kaat ventured, "you might as well tell me everything." And she encouraged him with one of those smiles that she took back with her eyes.

  And so the Potter, calculating that he had very little to lose, lowered his voice and told her what seemed safe to tell her: about the Sleeper working (as he discreetly put it) for the Soviet government; about how he had learned the Sleeper had been betrayed; about how he had used the false passport and the American money he had stashed away years before to cross Europe and the Atlantic to Canada, and then made his way to New York, to Brooklyn Heights, to Love Apple Lane-to warn the Sleeper, to tell him of the death of his father; to free him.

  Kaat, in turn, described the departure of the Sleeper four days earlier.

  He had received a letter in the morning mail (no, she hadn't noticed the postmark) and announced, in midafternoon, that he was going to visit an old Army friend in Pennsylvania. On her way down to the basement laundry room she had overheard him on the kitchen phone inquiring where something left from, inquiring also how long he would have to wait for a connection in Scranton. "He asked the person on the other end if it was

  'gray as in the color 'gray,' " Kaat remembered. "Later he made a point of saying he was going by train, but I knew he was going by Greyhound."

  When the Potter looked confused, she added, "Greyhound is the name of a bus company."

  "Of course! He went to Scranton by Greyhound. But where did he go after Scranton?"

  "I can always ask him where he is when he calls up," Kaat said.

  The Potter stared at her. "What makes you think he will call you up, if you please?"

  "Here's the thing," Kaat began, flustered. "Peter- how can I explain this?-Peter's not exactly like other men. Sexually, I mean. He's anfractuous." She spotted the puzzled look in the Potter's eyes. "You won't know what 'anfractuous' means. It's one of my A words. It means full of windings and turnings."

  "An-"

  "-fractuous. When I first met Peter-I lived in an apartment farther down Love Apple Lane, and my cat, whose name is Meow, escaped into his backyard-he was living with Millie. We hit it off, the three of us, and they eventually invited me to join them."

  "The boy with the bicycle said there were two women living with Piotr."

  Kaat nodded. "Everybody on the block knows about us. We're something of a vicious triangle. She likes me, I like him and he likes-liked-her."

  "You said something about him phoning." "I was getting to that,"

  insisted Kaat. "One of Peter's sexual windings and turnings is that when he's away from home, he makes love to other women. And he likes to phone us up and describe it while he's doing it. Sometimes he even puts the woman on and makes her describe it."

  The Potter recalled the Sleeper's sexual habits from Moscow, remembered analyzing his fetish of phoning up previous bed partners while making love to someone else as his way of throwing little hooks into the past; remembered also concluding that the Sleeper's strength was that he knew his weaknesses. "You like this sort of thing?" he asked Kaat now.

  Her eyebrows shot up. "Of course I do. Doesn't everyone?"

  He avoided the issue. "You think he will call up from Pennsylvania while he is having sex with someone?" />
  "He has every time he went away before," Kaat pointed out. "He was in Denver last February to show his mobiles and called up three times."

  Kaat studied the Potter with her deep-set eyes. "When he phones up," she explained to the Potter excitedly, "I can tell him that you're here, that you want to see him-"

  The Potter shook his head. "He will not believe you," he said flatly.

  "He has been trained not to believe you. He has been trained to disregard all contact that appears to originate with friends. He will think the Americans put you up to it. He will suspect the call is being traced and hang up on you. He will never call back again."

  "What can I tell him, then?" Kaat asked in despair, chewing again on a fingernail.

  "You cannot tell him anything," the Potter instructed her. "You can only listen to what he says and try to figure out where he is. And then let me know."

  The Potter glanced at the coffee-shop window and saw that the boy with the bicycle was still there, staring at them through the glass. "What does he want?" he asked Kaat.

  "I wasn't sure what I'd find when I got here," she explained, "so I asked him to hang around just in case I needed someone to scream for help." She waved to the boy, who waved back and leaping onto his bicycle, pedalled off.

  "Assuming we do find out where Peter is," Kaat concluded thoughtfully,

  "the trouble is, he may no longer be there by the time we arrive.

  Pennsylvania is a big state, you know," she added gloomily.

  "What do you mean, 'when we arrive'?"

  "I'm going with you," Kaat announced.

  The Potter waved a hand in frustration. "That is out of the question,"

  he declared.

  Kaat squinted at him across the table. "Then when I find out where he is, I'll go without you!"

  "Why do you want to go?" the Potter demanded in exasperation.

  "I have nothing to stay here for now," Kaat fired back. For her the couple (or "triple," as Millie liked to call it) was essentially a conspiracy; an "us" against a "them"; something to help her survive endings, which were invariably unhappy. She sensed that she had lost Peter forever. What was more normal than to be drawn to a new mystery, a new conspiracy? She stared at the Potter for a long moment. Then he lowered his eyes. "So that's settled," Kaat said. Before he could argue, she added, "I've had an anacalypsis. That means 'revelation, as in

  'brilliant idea. Peter's obviously somewhere around Scranton. Why don't we rent a car and drive to Scranton? Millie can hold the fort on Love Apple Lane and record the conversation if Peter phones up. Millie's a model, you see. She has one of those tape machines hooked up to the phone so she won't miss a booking. We can call her up from Scranton and get her to play the conversation back to us. That way, Feliks- you don't mind if I call you Feliks, do you?-there'll be less time between his phone call and our arrival; there'll be more of a chance of still finding him there." She noticed the expression on his face. "Don't worry," she whispered. "I'm not a political person-I have no ideological axe to grind." She raised her right hand as if she were taking an oath.

  "I promise to be a noiseless patient spider seeking spheres to connect."

  And she added, "That's another line from your Walter Whitman."

  The Potter had to admit that Kaat's scheme was as good as any he could devise. And travelling with the girl, unorthodox as it seemed, offered certain advantages, from a professional point of view. For one thing, he would be less likely to stand out in a crowd. He could use her to rent cars and buy train tickets and reserve hotel rooms, thus exposing himself less. More important, she would be the one to call the Sleeper's number in Brooklyn Heights, a fact that would arouse less suspicion if, as he suspected, the phone were being tapped by the people who had awakened the Sleeper.

  "I accept your proposition with pleasure," the Potter announced with irritating politeness.

  "You are bowing to the inevitable," she noted, "but you are bowing gracefully. And gracefulness, in my book, is next to cleanliness. And everyone knows what cleanliness is next to." She reached across the table for his hand. The Potter was familiar with the American habit of shaking hands to conclude a deal, and he offered his. But she didn't want to shake hands; she wanted to study his fingernails. She brought his hand across the table and leaned over it. "Do you believe in reincarnation?" she asked. She didn't wait for him to reply; somehow she knew what he would say. Like Peter, he had the look of someone rooted in reality. "I do," she insisted. "I've had four lives already that I remember. This is my fifth." She studied his fingernails, touched one as if she were testing its texture, then turned his hand over and peered at his palm. "You've had at least two previous incarnations," she said.

  "You were a victim in both-that much any idiot can see."

  "That," the Potter told her with undisguised sarcasm, "should give me a certain amount of training for my present incarnation."

  The Potter lingered in the shadows of the warehouse across the street from the pier waiting for Kaat to pass. She was driving one of those ridiculous American automobiles with shark's fins rising in the back and chrome everywhere. When she failed to find him, she followed his instructions and circled the block. He let her come around three more times to make sure she was not being followed-or hadn't betrayed him!-

  before he stepped out under the streetlight and flagged her down.

  "I was beginning to think you'd never turn up," she groaned as the Potter tossed his valise into the back and slid into the passenger seat.

  She sounded winded, as if she had been running; tired, as if she hadn't had a good night's sleep for some time.

  A cat, rolling its R's in a mixture of pain and frustration, howled in the back seat.

  "What is that?" the Potter asked, startled.

  "That," announced Kaat, throwing the car into gear, "is my cat. She is in heat-"

  "What does that mean, in heat?"

  Kaat looked quickly at the Potter. "It means she's having her period.

  She wants a male of the species, is what it means. She howls for days when she's in heat. Millie refused to keep her, but I don't hold it against her. Millie is basically a dog person. I don't mind dogs personally as long as they have the sense of independence of a cat. The female of the species is especially independent. Having a female cat has advantages and disadvantages, but males are impossible unless you fix them, and that's one thing I could never bring myself to do. I mean, can you imagine the guilt you must feel living with an anorchous cat-"

  "That must be one of your A words," the Potter noted.

  Kaat maneuvered the rented Chevrolet onto the ramp leading to the Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan. "You catch on fast," she said. "It means without testicles."

  "You are talking a great deal," the Potter said in a voice so utterly calm that Kaat found it irritating.

  "That is because I am appropriately nervous," Kaat admitted. "My mouth is dry. My pulse is racing. I am suppressing the desire to scream. All that business about going to the other end of Brooklyn to rent a car, of circling the block until I found you. You will have to understand that this is the first genuine nonsexual adventure of my life, and I am taking it very seriously."

  The Potter studied her out of the corner of his eye as she steered the car through evening traffic, across Manhattan toward the Holland Tunnel.

  She gripped the wheel with both hands, which he noticed now were long and exceptionally pale, with a ring on every finger except her thumb.

  Several of the nails were bitten down to the quick. It occurred to the Potter that she drove well, working the clutch and the gearshift effortlessly, weaving in and out of lanes, leaning on the horn in exasperation when the car in front went too slowly for her, all the while keeping up a steady stream of conversation. "I studied art," she was saying, "because I was convinced I'd been a painter of still lifes in one of my four previous incarnations. I actually went to Florence for a year to learn how to restore still lifes. Did you know that it's easier to restore ver
y old paintings than relatively new ones? That's because it takes a hundred years before paint is really dry on a canvas." Kaat sighed. "There's a certain symmetry to my life, I have to admit it. I began with still lifes and wound up with still lives," she plunged on, casting an occasional sideways glance at the Potter to make sure he was paying attention. "I started restoring paintings for a living and wound up restoring corpses."

  The Potter, who had had a good deal of experience with death in his day, asked how she felt in the presence of death.

  "Here's the thing," she answered as the cat leapt with a sour howl onto the back of the driver's seat and stretched out behind Kaat's neck.

  "Since I believe the spirit of the dead person is merely in a limbo between two incarnations," Kaat continued, arching her neck against the cat, "I guess I don't feel sad, if that's what you mean. How about you?

  How do you feel in the presence of death?"

  The Potter turned away to stare out of the side window. "It has been my experience," he observed with a certain melancholy, "that being in the presence of night, of death, loosens one's bowels, dulls one's appetites, dampens one's enthusiasm, since it demonstrates in an unforgettable way how that fragile thing called life will inevitably end'

  Kaat shook her head vigorously. "When all is said and done, we haven't got much in common, you and I," she told him. Ahead, the streets were crammed with cars and trucks approaching the Holland Tunnel toll-booths.

  She shrugged fatalistically. "I suppose we are antiscians. That refers to people who live on the same meridian, but on either side of the equator, which means that at high noon their shadows tall in opposite directions."

  The Potter nodded in agreement. "We come from different planets," he said. "When you were in school, your mother gave you a sandwich and sent you off on a bus."

  "Something like that," Kaat agreed.

  "My mother gave me an ear of corn. A plowhorse came by to take us to school. There was nobody to help us climb up on him. So we would drop the ear of corn on the ground, and when he lowered his head we would grab his ears and shinny up his neck. I remember that there were seven of us crammed onto the back of the horse by the time he got to school.