by Alma Katsu
Her expression is inscrutable, light and dark. “Yes, we did.”
FORTY-SEVEN
PARIS, ONE MONTH AGO
Gray day. I peeked from behind the curtains at the thin sliver of sky visible from the third story of my home, one in a series of ancient row houses in the fifth arrondissement. It was the start of winter in Paris, which meant that almost every day would be gray.
I turned on my computer, then stood by the desk and stirred cream into my coffee while the computer started up. I find the series of whirs and clicks subliminally comforting, like the chirping of birds or some other sign of life external to mine. I cherish normalcy and long for as much routine as I can cram into what is otherwise a free-form existence.
I sipped the coffee. Though I don’t really need it the way some people do to pull them into consciousness, I drink it out of habit. I’d barely been asleep, a catnap really; I’d been up until the wee hours as usual, dutifully doing research needed for the book I had been contracted to write but which now bored me to impatience. Then, tiring of that, I resumed cataloging my ceramics collection while watching reruns of American television. I had gotten to the point of thinking I’d send my ceramics collection off to a university or an art museum, someplace where it would be seen. I’d gotten tired of having so much clutter around all the time, pulling at me like hands clawing from the grave. I felt the need to shed a few things.
My email finished loading and I glanced down the list of the senders’ addresses. Business, mostly: my lawyer, my editor at the wonky small press that had published my precious monographs on ancient Asian ceramics, an invitation to a party. What a life I’d made for myself over the past twenty years as a faux expert on Chinese teacups. My false identity was based on a collection of priceless cups my Chinese employer had pressed into my arms as I boarded a British ship to escape the ransacking nationalists. This had happened in The Jade Pagoda days, another lifetime ago, another story no one knew.
Then I noticed, in the list of emails, an address I didn’t recognize. From Zaire—oh, only it’s called the Democratic Republic of Congo now. I could remember when it was the Belgian Congo. I frowned to myself; did I know anyone in Zaire? It was probably a plea for charity or a scam, a con artist claiming to be an African prince who just needed a bit of help out of a temporary pecuniary dilemma. I almost deleted it without opening it but at the last minute changed my mind.
“Dear Lanny”—it read—“Hello from the one person you thought you’d never hear from again. First, let me thank you for honoring my last request by not trying to track me down at any point since we parted …”
Damn innocent words, written in flickering pixels on the screen. Print, I jabbed at the clicker on the mouse. Print, damn you, I need to hold these words in my hands.
“… I hope you’ll forgive me for imposing on you like this. For all its convenience, I’ve never gotten over the feeling that correspondence by email is somehow less polite and correct than writing a letter. I find using the telephone difficult for the same reason. But I’m pressed for time, so I had to resort to email. I will be in Paris in a few days and would like very much to see you while I am there. I hope your schedule will allow for this. Please write back and let me know if you will see me … Fondly, Jonathan.”
I scrambled into the seat quickly, fingers poised over the keys. What to say? So much bottled up inside after decades of silence. Of wanting to speak and having no one to speak to. Of talking to the walls, to the heavens, to the pigeons, to the gargoyles clinging to the spires of Notre Dame Cathedral. Thank God—I thought I’d never hear from you again. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Does this mean you’ve forgiven me? I’ve been waiting for you. You can’t imagine how it feels to see your name on my computer screen. Have you forgiven me?
I hesitated, clenched my hands into two tight fists, shook them, unfurled them, shook them again. Hovered over the keyboard. Finally, typed “Yes.”
Waiting for that day to arrive was torturous. I tried to keep a tight rein on my expectations. I knew better than to get my hopes up, but there was still a small part of me that harbored romantic dreams where Jonathan was concerned. It was impossible not to indulge in a daydream or two, just to feel joy like that again. It had been so long since I’d had anything to look forward to.
Jonathan told me about his life in his second email. He’d picked up a medical degree in the 1930s in Germany, and used it to travel to poor and remote places to deliver medical services. When one had suspect paperwork, it was easier to get past the authorities in isolated areas where a doctor was needed and harried government officials could push your case through. He’d worked with lepers in the Asian Pacific, smallpox victims in the subcontinent. A hemorrhagic fever outbreak took him to central Africa and he had remained to run the medical clinic in a refugee camp near the Rwandan border. It’s not open-heart surgery, he’d typed: gunshot wounds, dysentery, and measles vaccinations. Whatever is needed.
What could I say in response, other than to confirm the time and place we were to meet? It thrilled and unsettled me to think Jonathan was a doctor, an angel of mercy. But Jonathan was waiting for me to tell him about my life, and as I sat before the computer I couldn’t think what to write. What could I say that wasn’t embarrassing? Life had been difficult after we’d parted. I’d done stupid things, which I believed at the time to be necessary for my survival. Now, finally, my life was peaceful, almost a nun’s life and not entirely out of choice. But I had come to terms with it.
Jonathan would notice my omission, but I assured myself that he wouldn’t harbor any illusion that I’d changed in our time apart—at least not as dramatically as he had. Instead, my first email to Jonathan was full of pleasantries: how I was looking forward to seeing him and the like.
I couldn’t sleep at all the night before and sat up, looking into a mirror. Would I look different to him? I examined my reflection fastidiously, worried that there had been changes, as though I was like the women in commercials fretting over laugh lines and crow’s-feet. But there were no changes, I knew. I still looked like a college student with a permanently cross expression. I had the same smooth face that Jonathan had looked on the day he left. I still had the smolder of a young woman who could not get enough sex, even if in truth I’d had enough sex to last my multiple lifetimes. I didn’t want to look desperate when he saw me, but there was no way to avoid it, I realized, looking into the mirror. I would always be desperate for him.
Still staring in the mirror, I wondered if it would seem strange and maddening, when we met tomorrow. To look at each other, time might as well be standing still. How long had it been since I’d last seen Jonathan? One hundred and sixty years? I couldn’t even remember what year he had left me. I was surprised to find that it no longer hurt violently, that it had taken decades but the pain had eased into a dull throb, and was easily outweighed by my eagerness to see him.
I put down the mirror. It was time for a drink. I cracked open a bottle of champagne. What was the use in saving it for tomorrow in the hope that he was coming back to me? Wasn’t it enough cause for celebration that Jonathan had contacted me after an eternity of separation? I resolved to nip my hope in the bud before I changed the sheets or put extra towels in the bathroom. He was coming to visit me and nothing more.
Meet me in the lobby at noon, he had instructed in his last email. I could barely wait and considered instead camping out at an earlier hour or going up to Jonathan’s room. But wouldn’t that be pathetic; better to pretend I could exercise self-control. So instead, I watched the hands of the clock in my study crawl to eleven o’clock before I stepped outside, hailed a taxi, and directed it to the Hotel Prix St. Germain. From the back window of the taxi, I watched my street peel away like the cartoon-painted backdrop to a carousel when the music started up.
I knew of the Hotel Prix St. Germain, but had never been there. It was a quiet place buried on an unfashionable street on the Left Bank, quite in keeping for a bush doctor in Paris for a few days.
The air in the lobby was stale, and a professionally dour-looking clerk behind the front desk watched as I took a seat in one of the leather club chairs in the lobby. Did all hotel lobbies feel like this, like a room holding its breath? The chair I had selected faced the path that ran between the door and the front desk. An ornate old clock suspended over the front door read 11:48. As a young man, Jonathan had made it a rule to keep others waiting. As a bush doctor, I imagined he’d learned to be more punctual.
A discarded morning newspaper sat on the side table. Never one to follow world events, I rarely bothered to get a newspaper these days. Events confused me, they had all become similar. I’d watch the evening news and slip into an uncomfortable feeling of déjà vu. A slaughter in Africa? Was it Rwanda? No, wait, that was 1993. Or the Belgian Congo, or Liberia? A head of state shot? A plummeting stock market? A plague, of polio, smallpox, typhus, or AIDS? I’d lived through all of it from a safe distance and watched as events ravaged and terrorized mankind. It was terrible to see the suffering, and be unable to affect anything. I was a ghost standing in the background.
I could see how it might have appealed to Jonathan to go to medical school, to equip himself to do something about the terrible things going on in the world. To roll up his sleeves and apply himself, even knowing that it would be impossible to eradicate disease, even within a single village, but trying nonetheless. Without realizing it, my eyes had fallen to the newspaper the entire time I’d been thinking.
I looked up abruptly, anticipating Jonathan’s entrance.
The front door was pushed open and I leaned forward anxiously at what seemed to be a familiar shape, but relaxed again. The man was wearing wrinkled khakis and an age-worn tweed jacket. A piece of cloth in some ethnic pattern was wrapped around his neck, sunglasses were over his eyes. And his face had grown over, three or more days’ worth, scruffy and uneven.
The man walked right up to me, hands in his pockets. He was smiling. Then I knew.
“Is this the welcome I’m to get? Don’t you remember what I look like? Maybe I should have sent a recent picture,” Jonathan said.
We went outside at Jonathan’s suggestion, saying I looked faint. Jonathan took my arm right away and held it tightly as he escorted me out to the sidewalk. We found a quiet corner of a park that was all cement and park benches, only one lone tree bounded by concrete on four sides, but it gave the illusion of nature.
“It’s good to see you.”
I couldn’t answer and my response was unnecessary anyway. It seemed absurd that he had been absent from my life this long and, seeing him again, it seemed no reason on earth should keep us apart. I wanted to touch him and kiss him, to reassure myself that he was there, in the flesh, before me. But as familiar as we were to each other, more than a hundred years of separation stood between us. And, something about his demeanor told me to proceed slowly.
Once I’d regained color, we found a café and ended up staying for hours. Over coffee and tumblers of Lillet and cigarettes (for me—though Jonathan the doctor disapproved), we sat in a booth and caught up on several lifetimes. The bush stories were fascinating and I was amazed that Jonathan could be so happy in a land as dry and sparse as Maine was cool and lush. That he could sit in a tent, patiently filling syringes without a thought to the mosquitoes buzzing around him. Malaria, West Nile, what did it matter to him? He volunteered to trek into a valley gripped by an outbreak of dengue fever. He’d carried antidiarrheals and other medicines on his back when the Land Rover couldn’t cross the river. As much as I admired what he did, the stories of putting himself in danger made me uncomfortable, even though such fears were irrational.
“How did you find me, after all this time, in all the world?” I asked him, finally, dying to know. He smiled cryptically, and took another sip of his aperitif.
“It’s a funny story. The short answer is technology—and luck. I’d been wanting to look you up for a long time, but struggled with this very question. How in the world could it be done? The answer began with a children’s book I happened to see at a colleague’s house—”
“The Jade Pagoda,” I guessed.
“The Jade Pagoda,” he answered, nodding. “Reading the book to the colleague’s child, I recognized you in the drawings. With a little research, I found the artist’s model—Beryl Fowles, a British expatriate living in Shanghai—”
“I always liked that name. Made it up myself.”
“—and hired someone to find out what he could about Beryl. But by then, Beryl Fowles had been gone for decades.”
“And yet you still found me.”
“I hired an investigator to track down who had inherited Beryl’s money, and so on and so on, but the trail ran cold eventually.”
“But you didn’t give up?”
Jonathan smiled at me again. “Here’s where technology comes in. You know about the photo-recognition software they have online these days, so you can try to find photos of yourself or friends on websites? Well, I tried it on one of the pictures in the book and damn if it didn’t work. It wasn’t easy, and I had to be persistent, but it came up with one match, a thumbnail photograph of the author of a little monograph on ancient Chinese teacups, of all things … I never would have thought you’d become an expert on Chinese porcelain. Anyway, your publisher told me how to contact you.”
The Chinese teacups entrusted to me by my employer in Shanghai, where I’d gone to work after posing for the children’s book. And so my last great adventure in China had led Jonathan back to me.
We ended up at my home by late afternoon, the champagne drunk and a cabernet three-quarters done along with the foie gras and toast. At Jonathan’s insistence, I showed him around the house, but I became more and more embarrassed with each room. I amazed even myself with the multitude of things acquired over the years, hoarded as a cushion against the relentless future. Jonathan said kind words, praised my foresight in saving rare and beautiful things for future generations, but he only meant to assuage my guilt. A bush doctor didn’t travel with a freighter’s worth of bric-a-brac. There was no storehouse of mementoes waiting for Jonathan’s return. I came across a box I hadn’t seen in nearly two decades, full of precious jewelry that had been given to me by admirers: a ring with a ruby the size of a grape; a stickpin with an heirloom blue diamond. The sight of such excess was sickening and I pushed it back in the forgotten bookcase where it had been moldering.
We came across worse: there was plunder, things I had spirited out of faraway countries during my frantic years. Surely Jonathan recognized them for what they were: beautifully carved Buddhas, hand-knotted rugs of twenty colors, ceremonial armor. Treasures I’d gotten in trade for long rifles or taken at gunpoint or—in some cases—stripped off the dead. All of it would go, I vowed, closing the doors to these rooms; every stick and statue would be sent off to museums, back to their native lands. How could I have lived so long with these things in my house, without even a thought to them?
The last room we toured was my bedroom on the top floor. It had the sad air of a room no longer used for its intended purpose. There was a Swedish headboard and bedstead beside a set of tall, narrow windows; the windows and the bed were draped in white cotton, an ice blue silk comforter thrown over the mattress. An eighteenth-century French secretary served as a computer table, spindly legs and all, with a Biedermeier chair pulled in front of it. The table was strewn with papers and knickknacks, a gray silk dressing gown was draped over the chair. All gave it the look of a room in which the dustcovers had only recently been pulled off the furniture, as though everything had been in waiting.
Jonathan stood in front of the picture that hung opposite the bed. The artist’s name was long lost, but I remembered the day the sketch had been made. Jonathan didn’t want to sit for the portrait but Adair had insisted, so he was caught leaning back churlishly in a chair, dark and moody and breathtaking. He thought he would spoil the picture but damn if it hadn’t made the drawing better. We both stood in front of it, taken back
nearly two centuries.
“Of all the treasures you’ve amassed in this house … I can’t believe you kept this stupid drawing,” Jonathan said, weakly. When he saw the stricken look on my face, he softened and took my hand. “But of course you would … I’m glad you did.” We gave it one last look before walking out of the room.
By the time night had fallen, Jonathan was sprawled on a couch in the drawing room and I was on the floor, leaning against an armrest. We’d swapped stories for hours. I’d broken down and told him some of the past I was ashamed of: going out in search of adventure with the madman who’d taken Jonathan’s place when he left me. His name was Savva and he was one of us, one of Adair’s early companions, the only other one of us I’d ever run across. Savva had the misfortune of being found by Adair, centuries back, near St. Petersburg, stranded in a storm. Savva wouldn’t share the details of his falling-out with Adair, but I could guess at them, for Savva had a mercurial temper and a sharp, impatient tongue.
Because Savva couldn’t stand to be in any place for long, we’d roamed the continents like exiles. For a man who had been born into ice and snow, Savva was inexplicably drawn to heat and sun, which meant we spent most of our time in northern Africa and central Asia. We’d traveled with nomads across deserts, run guns through the Khyber Pass. Taught Bedouins to shoot the long rifle, even lived with the Mongols for a while (they had been impressed with Savva’s extraordinary equestrian skill during the chase to hunt them down). We were together, close as brother and sister, until the end of the nineteenth century. We just realized that we had nothing left to say to each other. We probably should have parted decades before, but it had been too easy being with someone who needed no explanations.
“And you.” I took the opportunity to change the subject, exhausted from dredging up those memories. “Surely you haven’t been alone this whole time. Did you ever marry again?”
