Hidden Moon

4

Across the table, she lit another cigarette, puffed nervously, put it down, then picked it up again, just held it. It quivered as her fingers shook for an instant, then was still. “I have a child. A son.”

Just like that. It was a plea for forgiveness. She looked at me as if she had made a horrible admission, as if she had broken a favorite vase of mine. I never knew a more painful silence. It didn’t last more than a second, but I thought it had swallowed me up and left me in some other place on the other side of the world, so I didn’t know who she was or what language she was speaking. It wasn’t the fact that shook me, not that she had a child, but the anguish it caused her to say the thing out loud. I couldn’t see what there was to forgive.

We were sitting in her apartment. It made mine look like a closet. She had said she needed to talk to me, only this time I could tell she meant it. That was good, because I needed to talk to her. I was still wobbly from my last meeting with the man in the brown suit, but I couldn’t lie in bed forever. She came over to my apartment house to pick me up just past noon. A group from the apartment was sitting on the ground near the bushes, arguing about whose fault it was that the garden plot hadn’t been weeded. They pretended to ignore me when I passed them, but as I climbed into her car, a lot of necks were craning. She drove fast, with a nervous foot on the gas and not much attention to lanes. I closed my eyes and relaxed; after what I’d been through, there wasn’t any sense in worrying about my fate. When we got to her apartment, she pulled around the back. A guard checked her license plate, flicked his eyes at me, then waved her into a space reserved for six or seven cars. There was another guard at the door, but unlike the old lady in my apartment house, he didn’t say anything as we passed by.

The apartment was on the tenth floor. The elevator worked, which I was glad of because I didn’t want to climb stairs. There were lights in the hallway, and the gray-white paint on the walls was only just beginning to peel from the moisture. She had a few framed photographs on a low table in the main room; they looked like they might be family. One had her posed in front of a mountain that came down to a rough and foggy beach. She wasn’t smiling in the picture.

“I can see it in your eyes, Inspector. You’ve already begun to look at me differently. You are one of those who can’t forget anything, aren’t you? Forgetting is a coin you can spend anytime you want, but you are a miser. You have no memories.” She wasn’t speaking to me now, not exactly, but off into the distance at someone else I couldn’t see. “An inability to forget is not memory. It’s a form of cowardice. Like pulling yourself back from sleep at the last moment. You remember too much, you forget too little. You know why? Because you are afraid if you forget often enough, it will become an addiction.”

I knew she wasn’t expecting me to say anything, not yet. My silence seemed to bring her back from wherever she had been. Her voice was calmer. “Is there something here”-she gestured not around the room but as if we were on a hill and she was pointing out the city and the fields and the solitude beyond-“something here you would choose to remember? Better forget it, or is there nothing else for you to hold?”

She was wrong. I had forgotten something; why had I come, what did I want to ask her? It was as if she had taken an eraser to my memory. I couldn’t remember anything except her face, and how close it was to mine. “That’s fine,” I said finally, but hearing the words I knew they were wrong, wrong words, wrong voice. I sat back. “What I mean is, it’s a fine thing, bringing children into the world.” I paused. What was that supposed to mean?

“He’s with my relatives in our village in Kazakhstan.” The cast of her features became impassive, like ancient rock, but her eyes were filled with fury. “No, he isn’t part Scottish. He’s all Kazakh.” Her voice trailed off. She turned away, so I took a breath, nothing too deep because I was afraid it would sound like a sigh.

“A son is a good thing.” Not what I meant to say, not at all what I meant. My voice sounded strange in my ears. “All children, they’re good.” That sounded worse. She turned back and looked at me with such ferocity that I began to squint.

“Shut up! You bastard, can’t you hear me? I told you I have a son, Kazakh, he’s fifteen, do you know what that means?”

I started running through the list of possibilities in my head. That put her at least at thirty, maybe a little younger, but I was doubtful. It meant she’d been with a Kazakh man when she was just a girl. I sighed without thinking. Maybe an arranged marriage. I could feel the pulse pounding in my temples.

“You have nothing to say? You don’t care? You despise me?” At this rate, the volcano inside her would explode just as the headache broke across the top of my skull. I looked at her dumbly, more dumbly than I intended.

I shook myself into speech. “No, why should I despise you? You have a child. I’m glad of it.” I brightened at the sound of that thought. “Yes, I am, I’m glad of it. It makes you, I don’t know”-I held up my hands in hopes that the gesture would release me, but it only made me look like I was holding a watermelon-“it makes you fuller, more complete, even more beautiful.” Was that what I meant to say? It was, I think it was, or close to it. But it wasn’t why I had come over, or was it? I couldn’t remember. Such a horrible moment, when everything hung in the balance, maybe this was like being in front of a firing squad. I’d seen a prisoner shot, once. He had held his breath, waiting. I decided to breathe, chanced another breath, a small one. Unless she was listening closely, she wouldn’t know it was a sigh. She put her head down on the table and began to sob. “Yes,” I said, not knowing what to do, “a son is good, and I know he must be a fine boy.” This was an impossible conversation. I had never had a conversation like this, sat so close to a beautiful woman, a woman who was sobbing, her body convulsed with sobs, and I didn’t understand why, I couldn’t have told anyone why. It escaped me utterly, what I was to do. I felt diminished, unequal, drowning. It was a relief when the sobbing stopped, when she lifted her head and looked at me, straight into my eyes, and I shivered at knowing, in that instant, who I was.