No Enemy But Time - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Michael Bishop (Chapter Thirty) #32

Chapter Thirty

Marakoi, Zarakal

September 1987

They were seated beneath the fringed awning of Bahadur Karsanji’s on Tharaka Boulevard in the blindingly bright heart of the capital, Marakoi. Karsanji’s, a café, was one of the few businesses in the city still under Indian ownership after the wholesale “Africanization” of Asian-run establishments in 1972. It had escaped because it had a cosmopolitan clientele, a reputation for excellence antedating by three decades Zarakal’s political independence, and an owner of discreet Machiavellian canniness in matters of mercantile survival.

Nearly every table under the red-and-white awning was occupied, and the crowd inside the restaurant was creating a din twice as nerve-racking as that of the traffic in the streets. Joshua and his mother, three days after his awakening in the base hospital, were eating spinach-filled crêpes (Jeannette’s idea) and drinking a good California Chablis (his). At two o’clock that afternoon she would be departing the country from Marakoi International Airport, and they did not know when they would see each other again. The enlistment time remaining to Joshua complicated his situation, and so did his paternal claim on the infant in the hospital. Neither Kaprow nor Blair had welcomed this claim, for the paleoanthropologist viewed the Grub as the spoils of Joshua’s mission while the physicist regarded her as a vexatious temporal anomaly. Jeannette had no idea the infant even existed, for Joshua had refrained from mentioning her after collapsing in front of his mother and Jeannette had supposed his ravings about a daughter the products of disorientation and delirium. At present the child was the ward of the United States Air Force, with a room of her own on the hospital’s third floor and a round-the-clock guard.

Though Joshua had begged and ranted, the small special staff assigned to his daughter would not permit him to feed, bathe, or hold her. In fact, he had seen her only once during the past three days. An awkward swallow of Chablis choked him, blurring his vision.

“There you go,” said Jeannette Monegal, thumping his back. “You just haven’t readjusted to the pleasures of fine food and drink yet. What have they been feeding you at the hospital?”

“Rice.”

“What else?” she asked rhetorically. “I wrote you a letter, Johnny.”

“A letter? Why?”

“In case they wouldn’t let me see you.”

“They did, though.”

“Amazingly. Through Dr. Kaprow’s good offices. Neither the Air Force nor Alistair Blair nor the Zarakali government wanted to let me in. My book on Spain—it’s just come out—has already given me a reputation as a caustic international muckraker. I had to sign a document declaring that I was coming to Zarakal solely as a tourist. Supposedly, having signed the damn thing, I can’t even publish a travel article without first clearing it with the American Embassy and two or three local ministries.”

“You agreed to that?”

“To see you, yes—I certainly did.” She withdrew an envelope from her large straw purse. “Here’s the letter. Please don’t read it till I go. If you have any questions, you can write me in care of Anna in Newport News, Virginia. She and Dennis Junior are visiting in-laws. Here’s the address. I’ve got your APO number. We’ll stay in touch, okay? If you remove yourself from my life for another eight years, John-John, I’ll be an old woman when next we meet. So stay in touch, okay?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She slid a bill of large denomination across the table and stood up. He rose, too, but she would not permit him to accompany her to the airport, insisting that an airport farewell would “demolish me utterly,” phraseology he had never before heard on her lips. They had both changed in eight years, eroded or subtly augmented by the sweep of time’s river. The rattle of wine glasses and silverware, the background babble of English and Swahili—Joshua suddenly felt isolated and bereft. He wanted his mother to go quickly because he did not want her to go at all. She kissed him on the forehead, the blessing of a matriarch on one of her smallest and most beloved.

“Ciao, Johnny.”

“Cao,” he responded automatically.

Jeannette laughed. “I hope I’m not supposed to construe that as a slur. Even if I deserve it. ’Bye, honey. Be good.” She threw him a kiss and, carrying her own bag, stooped into the rear seat of a minicab parked about a quarter of a block from Karsanji’s. When the cab came cruising past the restaurant, she gave him a faint smile before stoically averting her gaze.

He ate the remainder of his crêpe, drank the last few sips of his wine, and, buoyed by the money she had left, ordered a custard and another bottle of Chablis. He was already high, and many of the people around him undoubtedly attributed his furtive glances at the street, his maniacal alertness, to the quantity of wine he was putting away. Or maybe he was involved in an illicit affair and both his drinking and his nervous watchfulness were inspired by guilt. The predator for which he kept watch might be his paramour’s cuckolded husband.

Actually, he was thinking of Helen and wondering what she would have made of this bizarre scene. The primeval savannah underlay nearly thirty square blocks of concrete, stucco, and glass. Males in cutaway jackets and leather sandals brought food to you at a table. The streets were full of unimaginable noise, and the women walking upright past the shop windows wore plumage as bright as, or even brighter than, that which the males wore…. Joshua was glad Helen had not survived to witness the benign horror of civilization, equally glad he had survived to reexperience it. To dislodge Helen from his mind, he opened his mother’s letter—which, over a year and a half ago, she had composed in longhand in Madrid.

Apologies and a quiet plea for reconciliation dominated the first page or so, shading away into news about Anna and her handsome new son. Johnny was an uncle; she, Jeannette, a grandmother. They would be a real family again when he and Dennis Whitcomb returned from East Africa—for Anna had ignored Johnny’s advice and spilled the beans about his assignment to Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base.

Well, of course she had. Joshua had belatedly realized that she would, driven by her sense of family and her respect for family hierarchies. It was all right. Joshua forgave Anna her trespass, which was less against him than against the Air Force and the sovereign state of Zarakal.

At which point the letter shifted gears again, moving from the topic of family bonds to that of blood relationships. A subtle, even disturbing shift. Joshua’s hands began to tremble—not merely from the heat and the wine—as he continued reading what his mother had written:

After doing my one and only novel (which did not of me an Agatha Christie or a Barbara Cartland make—so quickly back to nonfiction), I contracted with Vireo to do The Reign in Spain: Life and Politics in Post-Franco Iberia. Then I came here to research and write my book. Or, at least, the book was my ostensible reason for coming. The truth is that I thought you might be here, too, searching for a part of your own past you never had the opportunity to verify on your own.

Do you remember, when you were in your early teens you sometimes used to flaunt the nom de guerre Juan Ocampo? Usually you were pretending to be a Latin American shortstop on some major-league baseball team, but you also liked to sign that name to poems, to secret pacts with your boyhood friends, and to confidential Declarations of Independence from the tyranny of Mother and Father Monegal. These last documents you often managed to leak to the tyrants themselves by “caching” them in such out-of-the-way places as my American Heritage Dictionary or the catch-all drawer in Hugo’s workbench in the utility room.

Anyway, this behavior led me to suppose that you cherished the idea of an identity separate from the bourgeois one with which we had saddled you, and that one day you might try to inherit this alternative life. Maybe, in fact, this submerged identity would free you from the dreams that so frequently estranged you not only from us but from yourself. If he thinks that being Juan Ocampo will free him (I reasoned), he is very likely to go to Spain in search of the latent Juan Ocampo in his heart. The idea for the book I am now working on came to me as a pretext—a literal pretext—for following you to Spain.

And then Anna wrote to say you were going to Zarakal, shattering my hopes of finding you here and sentencing me to six months at hard labor on this brilliant book of mine.

The Reign in Spain (by Eliza Doolittle).

Anyway, I decided to find your mother. If she still happened to be alive. My researches were going to take me to Andalucía and Sevilla, in any case, and I might as well combine book business and my quasi-maternal curiosity to see what I could see.

Does the name Carl Hollis mean anything to you? Undoubtedly not. He was the intelligence agent who declared—during our interview in Colonel Unger’s office at Morón AFB almost a quarter of a century ago—that Encarnación Ocampo had disappeared, probably forever. I never knew if by that he meant that she was dead or that she had simply vanished into the concealing vastness of the countryside like a guerrilla fighter. Because the former assumption pretty much preempted hope, I decided to proceed on the latter.

A good thing, too, for, John-John, I found your mother.

Sam Spade and Phillip Marlowe have nothing on me, son—not, at least, when it comes to tracking Missing Mothers. (Missing Sons I am not so good at, even when they take up residence within spitting distance of their fathers’ last duty assignment. In a couple of other senses, though, I am damned adept at Missing You.) I won’t go into the details here. Suffice it to say that I returned to the tenement where Encarnación lived with you in 1962-63. Because I was obviously not a policewoman or a pusher of some vampirish sort, a surprising number of people talked to me. In many ways, after all, Encarnación was—is—a memorable figure, menacing or plucky depending on your point of view. I had always leaned to plucky—because, when she might have surrendered you to her despair, she saw you to the safety of Santa Clara.

Anyway, my informants—three of them, John-John—remembered your mother very well and gave me some profitable leads.

I traced Encarnación to an Andalusian village called Espejo. Here she is living today, Johnny, no longer either a prostitute or a black marketeer. She has redeemed her life in an extremely old-fashioned way, at least for the female of our species, and I will not presume any sort of political comment about this fact.

Not, at least, in this letter. You see, she is married to a robust, red-haired barkeep and bodega owner named Antonio Montaraz, who appears in his boisterous way to dote on her. She must be approaching the change of life, but she has had at least nine children by this man, the youngest a babe-in-arms whom she suckles between stints as a barmaid in Señor Montaraz’s dingy but prosperous hole-in-the-wall tavern. The children also help their father, and although there is a lot of public bickering and noise, the barkeep’s regime seems to be popular even among the older siblings. This is a tight-knit family, with both Antonio and Encarnación in stolidly traditional roles. It looks suffocating to me—pardon me, my slip is showing—but your mother seems to be more than content with her lot.

The principal question now in your mind is probably this: Did I talk to her? Tell her about you? Trot out my own maternal experiences as a counterweight to your mother’s? The answer to this question—these questions—is No, of course not. You see, Johnny, to the cheerfully busy Montarazes I was a dowdy/doughty Englishwoman, with a phrase-book command of Spanish, who had stumbled off a tour bus disastrously misrouted out of Córdoba. I did not try to correct this false impression.

Suppose that I had blurted out my story to Encarnación. Would she have recoiled from me as an evil messenger intent on destroying her present life with lurid tales of her past? It’s quite possible. Or suppose that my mentioning you, out of the hearing of her husband, had afflicted her with a terrible anxiety about your whereabouts, your safety, your happiness. Because I still cannot completely reassure myself on these points, I could not have reassured her, either. So I pretended to a tourist’s illiteracy and spoke only a little.

Do you, there in exotic Zarakal, remember your Spanish? Even a little? Well, the surname Montaraz means “wild, primitive, uncivilized,” and to some extent this is a perfect characterization of your little half-brothers and half-sisters. None is as dark as you, John-John, and I doubt seriously that any of them ever suffers cripplingly vivid dreams about prehistoric East Africa, but, in many respects, they are nevertheless a feral crew. Their mother signals them with rapid-fire hand gestures, which, even though they can all speak, they relay to one another with remarkable deftness, cutting their eyes for emphasis.

They communicate as effectively without words as with them, but they are noisy for Antonio’s sake. He is a raconteur and yowler who cannot keep his mouth shut.

I don’t think this is a milieu you would find especially compatible, but one day you may want to visit the Montarazes and decide for yourself. The address in Espejo is 17 Avenida de Franco. I caution you, however, to think about the likely impact of such a visit. The ramifications go far beyond the mere satisfaction of your filial curiosity.

That Encarnación is alive and happy in a world such as ours strikes me as a miracle, and miracles are their own justification. Although hope, faith, optimism, and the formidable power of what the late Dr.

Peale liked to call “positive thinking” are clearly essential to the progress of our species—toward what? toward what?—only a fool ignores the potential wartiness of both circumstance and the human heart. As a matter of fact, I approached my search for your biological mother as something of a fool’s errand, expecting from the outset to learn that she had hanged herself in an abandoned building, or suffered a fatal beating at the hands of a psychotic client, or surrendered to the ravages of venereal disease, or maybe even walked beneath a construction platform from which a scuttle of bricks had just fallen. I did not like to believe any of these possibilities, of course, but until my search ended, each seemed as likely as what has actually occurred. More likely, in fact, given your mother’s unpromising background and the prejudice against her as a bruja morisca. So cherish this miracle, Johnny, and think very carefully about your biological mother’s present happiness.

I also know what happened to your biological father, Lucky James Bledsoe. No miracle here. The bad news is that as a member of the Army’s First Cavalry Division he was killed twenty-one years ago in the Ia Drang Valley in South Vietnam. He had just turned eighteen. I discovered his fate by tracing his parents’ whereabouts through the Air Force locator service at Lackland.

The Bledsoes live in Little Rock, Arkansas. You would probably be a welcome visitor to their home, should you decide to approach them. Photographs of their son in his Seville Dependent High School Basketball uniform, his letter jacket, and his senior cap and gown—from a segregated civilian school in Montgomery, Alabama—decorate the walls of the Bledsoes’ paneled living room. I visited them five years ago, when I still had no inkling where you were, on the chance that you had somehow contrived to find them before I did.

Because LaVoy, Lucky James’s father, remembered Hugo from the days of their professional relationship on the flight line at Morón, the Bledsoes accepted me into their home. Neither LaVoy nor his wife Pauline believed that I had sought them out solely to renew an acquaintance that had never been very close to begin with. When I told them of Hugo’s death, they commiserated in a touchingly heartfelt way—but, while Pauline plied me with whiskey-and-7-Up cocktails, LaVoy asked harder and harder questions about the trouble I had gone to to find them, and I finally confessed that their dead son had a living heir.

This news did not shock or upset them. I think they were almost grateful for it. Which is why I believe you could step into their lives without wounding or discomfiting the Bledsoes. They are your grandparents, Johnny, and that night, when they asked me where you were, I had to confess my ignorance, my guilt, my sorrow. I wept unabashedly for ten to fifteen minutes, and Pauline—bless her—wept with me. We have written each other or exchanged telephone calls at least once a month ever since my visit, but I have not yet told them you are alive and presumably safe in another country. (Anna, after all, was not supposed to tell me.) That remains for you to do, if you believe they deserve this small consideration. To my mind, they do.

Lord, look how long this letter has grown. I’ve been working on it for three straight hours—while the streets of Madrid seem to be washing away under a heavy April rain. Después de Juan Carlos, el diluvio. The reign in Spain, I fain would claim, is not mainly on the wane. Nor the rain, either. But I am growing giddily weary of writing, as my prose shows, and I had better close. Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny.

—Eden in His Dreams.

See how stubbornly I resisted writing those words, how tenaciously I delayed the inevitable. Between writing “Scratch this entire paragraph, Johnny” and the next four words, nearly an hour passed. The sky is perceptibly lightening, the rain slackening. And I have finally written the phrase upon which this entire epistle teeters, even if that four-word fulcrum seems more than a tad off-center.

Johnny, forgive me. You will never fully understand how much I regret what I did, nor how dearly you have made me pay for that error. I am sorry for the pain I caused you, sorry for the pain I have reaped myself. If we should ever see each other again, I will probably not be able to speak of some of these things. This is why I have written about them at such stupid, even stupefying, length. You have an immense extended family, but though I have hurt you with one ill-considered act, and bewildered you by evolving from one sort of person into another (as I had to do), I hope that you will not exclude me forever from a place in this family. I belong there, too. In spite of everything, Johnny, I belong there, too.

All my love,

Mom

Joshua reread the letter twice, slid it back into its envelope, and put the envelope in an inside jacket pocket. He was wearing civilian clothes because off-duty American personnel, by treaty stipulation, were not permitted to wear their uniforms in either Marakoi or Bravanumbi. No one on either side wished to foster the impression that the Americans comprised an occupation force. Joshua therefore resembled an ambitious young native politician, a newcomer to the WaBenzi tribe. Although his nervousness distinguished him from most of the other smart go-getters drinking their lunches at Karsanji’s, he had not yet drawn undue attention to himself.

His mind turning like a merry-go-round past all the items in his mother’s letter, he drank, ordered more wine, and drank again. The last shuttle back to base left the embassy grounds at midnight; he could spend the next ten hours right here. For dinner, a kidney pie and a mug of thick Irish stout; then back to wine again. If he could not decide which long-range goal to pursue now that White Sphinx had ended and a thousand conflicting options vied for his approval, at least he could kill the remainder of the day.

Effortlessly. Painlessly.

“May I join you?”

Joshua looked up to see Alistair Patrick Blair standing beside the chair his mother had deserted.

Unenthusiastically he nodded the Great Man into the empty place.

“Where is Mrs. Monegal?”

“Leaving the country.”

“So soon?”

“She’s supposed to begin a promotional tour for her new book. Her visit here required her to drop four stops from her schedule, and her publisher did not exactly smile on the deletion.”

“She should tell her publisher to go to blazes,” Blair said amiably. “I never tour for my books.”

“Only to raise money for your digs.”

“That’s true enough.”

“My mother makes her living from her writing. My father made no arrangements to provide his family with survivors’ benefits, and he died before he got his Air Force pension.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Joshua.”

The two men stared at each other. Yesterday Joshua had unburdened himself of two years of his subjective experience in the distant past. Alternating questions about paleoanthropological and temporal matters, Blair and Kaprow had grilled him for ten solid hours—for the benefit of their own insatiable curiosity and two silently grinding tape machines. Joshua had told all, not omitting the details of his long and intimate relationship with the habiline woman he had named Helen.

That relationship explained the Grub, and Joshua did not intend to yield his daughter to anyone for the purpose of illegal, unethical, and immoral biological experiments. She was, as Kaprow had already conceded, a human being. Any viable offspring of a human parent was by definition—yes, by definition: his —a human being, and by denying him custody of the child, the United States Air Force and the Zarakali government were in violation of one of his most basic human rights. At the end of the ten-hour session Joshua had broken down and cursed both men, surrendering wholeheartedly to rage if not to tears.

“You’ve been drinking quite a lot, I think. Do you mind if I try to overtake you?”

“What for?”

“Well, Joshua, a celebration.”

“Of the fact that I’ve blown your Homo zarakalensis theory right out of the water?”

“If you like. However, I’m not convinced that you have, you know.”

“Or of your scuzzy treatment of my daughter and me?”

“Joshua, the child is a native Zarakali, with all the rights and privileges accruing to citizens of our republic. It’s possible that we could find excuses to limit your freedom, but never hers.”

“What, then, are we celebrating?”

“I thought Americans passed out cigars. I’ve not yet got mine. I suppose this excellent vintage must suffice.”

Joshua stared at the Great Man.

“Your first embarkation on the ocean of fatherhood.” Blair lifted the glass that one of Karasanji’s wine stewards had just provided him. “To Joshua Kampa, the New Adam, Futurity’s Sire.”

“Bullshit.”

“Very pretty, very aromatic bullshit.”

“But bullshit nonetheless.”

“Mzee Tharaka told me this morning that no matter what either I or the American authorities wish, your daughter must be remanded to your custody immediately. Should we balk on this point, he will expel me from my cabinet position and the Americans from their expensive new military facilities.”

“You told him about the Grub?”

“He already knew, Joshua.”

“How?”

“It seems that two of our nation’s would-be astronauts are also intelligence agents. They ran a fishing launch up and down Lake Kiboko during the White Sphinx Project and recorded your return to us through the telephoto lens of a hand-held movie camera. It was impossible to get you and the child from the omnibus to the medical station without bringing you briefly into the open.”

Joshua dimly remembered having seen a boat on the lake—a small boat, always at a distance.

“There’s more. Some of those bothersome Sambusai who occasionally come foraging over the protectorate—well, it appears that one or two of those fellows are also in Mzee Tharaka’s employ, for our President-for-Life has many eyes and ears. He was quite impressed with you the day you visited the Weightlessness Simulation Incline. He considers you a brave man. Before you return to the United States, you will be made an honorary citizen of Zarakal in a private ceremony at the President’s Mansion.

Do you begin to understand what you have to celebrate, Joshua?”

“The Grub is mine!”

“I would think you might wish to give her a more dignified name. Mzee Tharaka is sure to demand that much.”

“How do you think President Tharaka would like Monicah?”

“Monicah?”

“It’s a nice monicker, don’t you think? It’s the name I’ve had in mind, a decent English/Zarakali name.”

When Blair did not reply, Joshua added, “What else does the President intend to demand?”

Nonchalantly sipping, Blair beaded his mustachios with tiny rubies of Chablis. He patted his mouth with a napkin and eyed the passing traffic. “I fear that I’ve misspoken, Joshua. The President hopes you will always consider this country a second homeland; that once you have left the American military you will agree to reside in Zarakal with your daughter for at least a portion of each year. To this end, he has determined that you should receive a small annual stipend for your part in solidifying relations between our two countries. Also, a high-rise apartment here in Marakoi. It would be a shame, he believes, for, ah, Monicah to grow up solely as an American, nourished on hamburgers and banana splits, educated by television programs and cassette recorders, uprooted from the soil, the people, and the culture of her homeland. The idea of such total deracination appalls the President, and he is sure that you, as an intelligent black man, will see the matter pretty much as he does.”

“A high-rise apartment in Marakoi takes care of the problem?”

“Not entirely, no. Mzee Tharaka wishes you to regard yourself as a bridge between two worlds.

Marakoi is merely one of the anchors for the span. The other anchor could be Pensacola, Florida, or Cheyenne, Wyoming, or Wichita, Kansas. Wherever you like. But if you reject the high-rise apartment here in Marakoi, the bridge collapses for want of support, and commerce between your daughter’s native land and her adoptive one must necessarily cease, at least for you and your daughter. President Tharaka’s watchword has always been Let there be commerce.”

The wine he had drunk in the heat of the day had not made Joshua receptive to syllogistic argument. He felt that he had fallen into an intricate web. Now he was creeping along a filament leading deeper inward rather than out. What multi-eyed predator awaited him at the heart of this pattern?

Distracted, he muttered, “Persephone.”

“I beg your pardon.”

“He wants Monicah to spend a portion of each year in the underworld and a portion on earth with the living—like Persephone.”

Blair laughed. “Ah, yes. But which is which?”

“I’ve brought her out of the land of the dead, Dr. Blair.” He gestured at the crowd in the restaurant, at a strip of sky visible through a gap in the awning. “Everything up here is both. Not just in Marakoi. All over. Everywhere. There, too; even in the underworld.”

“You’re a trifle tipsy, aren’t you?”

“You’ve influenced President Tharaka in this. You want Monicah in Zarakal a part of each year so that you can prod and poke and measure and compare. Am I right?”

“That would be helpful. And no more harmful to the Grub, I would think, than a yearly physical examination.”

“She’s not one of your goddamn fossils!” Joshua was conscious of heads turning to track this outburst.

He lowered his voice: “Not one of your goddamn fossils. A human being. Helen’s daughter.”

Blair put his glass aside, scraped his chair back, and stood. “Of course. And your daughter, too. The medical people at the base have confirmed as much. So she’s yours, and Mzee Tharaka has interceded to insure that no one disputes your claim to her. His intercession warrants a little gratitude, don’t you think? Please consider this, Joshua, when the time comes to make a real decision.” After paying for his share of the wine with several notes engraved with portraits of the President in his hominid-skull crown and leopard-skin cloak, the Great Man gave Joshua an affectionate pat on the shoulder and headed off down Tharaka Boulevard toward the National Museum, from which he had apparently come for his midday break.

Joshua gave the African wine steward and the Indian waiter extravagant tips. Then he toddled uncertainly into the sunlight. The brightness of the buildings and the paving squares stunned him.

Peacocks strutted in a small emerald plaza beyond the nearest intersection. He walked about aimlessly for nearly an hour. Engine noise made him look up. Over the city a jet arrowed north-northwest into a wilderness of achingly empty sky. It was his mother’s flight to Rome, the first stop on her journey back to the States.

“Ciao,” he told the aircraft, saluting. “Ciao.” The other word he left unspoken, reverberating in his memory.

A chapter in his life—an era, rather—had come to a close. The slide show had finally ended. The early Pleistocene was no longer accessible to him in dreams, and the White Sphinx program was over, probably for good. Here he was, not quite twenty-five years old, and he was going to have to make a new life for himself. A host of options lay before him, but, tipsy with Chablis and sunshine, at the moment all he could truly feel was a powerful sense of loss and uncertainty. All the routes to his previous self—the self that had tried to survive as a loner in Fort Walton Beach—were blocked, and he did not know which new path to choose.

“Ciao,” he said again, and this time he was not talking to his mother.