Sorcerer's Feud

  “Mr. Cantescu is the victim,” Hu said, and I could imagine the frontier general staring down a whole horde of barbarians. “He’s not a suspect.”

  “Then why do you keep disturbing him?” Mellars said. “You have eyewitness testimony to the crime. The shooter is dead, isn’t he?”

  “Very true.” Hu turned to the uniformed cop. “Okay, let’s go.”

  They stalked out without so much as a goodbye. Tor put his phone away, then went to the door. He stared down the hall for a couple of minutes, until he could tell us they’d gotten into the elevator. Mellars turned to Brittany.

  “Why do they keep coming back?” the doctor said. “Do you know?”

  “No.” Brittany walked over to Roman’s bedside. “I just wish they’d stop doing it.”

  We all did know, of course. They wondered if Roman’s buddies in the ex-military PTSD group had killed Nils, and they were hoping he’d slip and give them a lead. As much as I hated lying to such a good ally as Dr. Mellars, I figured he’d be better off ignorant. Something he knew nothing of wouldn’t trouble his conscience. Only Tor and I knew how wrong the cops’ suspicious were. On the drive home, I kept brooding about it. Once we got off the freeway and reached the quiet streets near our house, I began rehearsing my fears aloud.

  “How can I even confess? They’d want to know how I killed Nils. Would they ever believe the truth?”

  “They’d only think you were lying to shelter me,” Tor said. “Maya, look. If what you did was really evil, then it will come back to you in some way. If the universe sees it the way I do, self-defense, that is, then it won’t. What the local laws demand is nothing compared to what the karmic balance exacts.”

  “Well, maybe, but—”

  Tor glanced my way, then returned to watching the road. “But what? Isn’t there a Buddhist law, if you kill someone to prevent him from working evil, then your action has its place in the scheme of things? I’m not saying it’s cool. Just that it had to be what it is.”

  “Like Krishna told Arjuna. Hindu.”

  “Well, whatever. Don’t worry so damn much.”

  I could think of nothing to say in answer. Tor’s attitude troubled me as much, if not more, as what I’d done. Yet that day my own attitude began to change. I had the right to escape. And if I hadn’t killed him, what would Valdez and his buddy have done if they’d found him? Nils would have ended up dead, either way. Although the guilt still made my stomach twist and my hands shake at moments, maybe, eventually, I could accept the necessity of what I’d done.

  A few days later, I received a letter from my mother, only a blue fold-up air letter, but a letter. I kissed it before I opened it. The abbess had relented, Mom told me, and let her communicate with the outside world, even though it had taken a while to wear her down. I smiled when I read that, because I knew how Mom got her way. Dad used to call her the “flower badger.” She was always very polite and sweet, but she never gave up when she really wanted someone to do something. She was well, she told me, and happy that I was getting married. In the picture I’d sent, Tor looked very handsome, and she knew he’d take good care of me.

  “But darling, my dearest girl,” she finished up, “please think twice before you have children. I know you know why I have to say this. Don’t be offended.”

  Yeah, I sure did, maybe better than she. No, I wasn’t in the least offended.

  I answered the letter, even though I doubted that the abbess would let Mom see it, not two whole letters in one year! I saved hers in the carved wooden box where I kept my few pieces of jewelry.

  Tor’s mother and sister were going to come to the wedding. I began to worry that they’d dislike my being Asian. My father’s family emigrated to the States from Romania, and some of their ancestors were Turkish. My mother’s came from Indonesia. Between them they gave me straight black hair and skin that’s an olive tan, I guess you could call it. Growing up, even in cosmopolitan San Francisco, I knew that the color of my skin mattered. Now I was going to meet Tor’s silver-haired mother and his sister, the blonde, blue-eyed woman I’d seen in Tor’s snapshots. I started to discuss the subject with Tor, but he tried to shrug it off.

  “Liv grew up in the Bay Area,” he said, “and my mom lived here for years. It’s not going to matter to them. They had lots of Asian friends. They still do write each other. And visit.”

  “Friends are different. You’re marrying me.”

  “Yeah, I am. And even if they didn’t like it, so what? You don’t think I’m going to change my mind, do you?”

  “No, of course not. But I’m just afraid of causing, y’know, friction in the family, because I’m different.”

  “Different?” Tor laughed under his breath. “Look, my mother has visions and talks to fox spirits. Liv can do all kinds of weird magics. Her kids are little sports of nature. Why in hell would they look down on you?”

  I began to feel better. “You’ve got a point. Sometimes I forget what kind of family I’m marrying into.”

  “Sometimes I forget how strange my family is. You don’t want to back out, do you?”

  “What? No!” I laid my hand on my cheek. “But there’s no use pretending I’m not scared of what they’ll think of me. Your mom, anyway. Liv and I have a lot in common already.”

  “I don’t—” He stopped in mid-sentence and thought for a moment. “I don’t understand, but I’ll take your word for it. I don’t think I can do more than try to understand. Look at me, Mr. White Male. And with money. What would I know about how it makes you feel?”

  I reached up and kissed him.

  “Thanks,” I said. “And I’ll try not to worry.”

  “Which reminds me, I need to buy you an engagement ring.”

  “Nothing too fancy, okay?”

  “You mean too expensive.”

  “Well, that, too. But look at my hands.” I held out the left. “They’re small, and I’ve got slender fingers. Some big flashy diamond thing would look all wrong.”

  “You’ve got a point. Okay, a small diamond. Tell you what, draw up some sketches of what you’d like, wedding rings, too. I know someone to make them.”

  “That’s such a cool idea! Thank you!”

  Tor grinned, and we shared a couple of kisses.

  “But don’t sketch something cheap, okay?” he went on. “You really don’t like it when I spend money on you. Why? Sweetheart, I like doing it.”

  “It makes me feel like I’m in debt to you. Y’know, obligated to do something in return.”

  “No, it’s part of my obligations, being generous.”

  “Obligations to what?”

  “My membership in the master race.”

  He was trying to keep a straight face, but the cute dimple at the corner of his mouth quivered and gave him away. When I laughed, he gave in and laughed with me.

  The joke made me wonder, though. What had I looked like in that German life? The next time I looked into a mirror to comb my hair, I saw a shadowy impression of Someone Else, Mia, I supposed, standing just behind my left shoulder. Blonde hair, cut short and waved in a 1930s fashionable perm, big blue eyes—she could have been Brittany’s sister, and about as Aryan as you can get.

  I finally got up the courage to take another look at the pictures of Audo online. Several I recognized immediately, there among all the other men who weren’t him, one where he was wearing an overcoat over a civilian suit and a hat at a dashing angle. It must have been winter in Berlin when it was taken. There was another of him in winter, in uniform with a jacket over it. It made me think of Tor’s past life as Lars, the Resistance fighter, who wore a heavy Nazi jacket he’d looted from a dying German officer.

  What a horrible, awful, gruesome time! I put the laptop away and went into the bathroom. In the mirror I saw Mia’s shadowy image, standing behind me. And what had she thought of it all, the Fatherland, the glorious thousand year Reich? At the question Mia took me over. I smiled, a crazed berserk almost animal grin. I felt tall, strong, full
of life and faith in the future.

  “Deutschland,” I said aloud, “über alles.”

  The spell broke, and I nearly vomited. Finally I saw why I’d tried to avoid remembering my last life. I’d believed in the Reich. I’d been the perfect little Aryan princess.

  “Go away!” I whispered. “Get away from me, you bitch!”

  The image vanished. I covered my face with both hands and wept.

  “Maya!” Tor came hurrying into the bathroom. “What’s wrong?”

  My mind froze. I don’t know what else to call it. The room grew distant, and I seemed to be seeing it through torchlight, torches flickering in the wind while thousands of voices cheered, a mindless roar of joy, over and over. Tor grabbed me by the shoulders. My vision cleared.

  “Awful memories,” I whispered.

  “Let’s go sit down.”

  Tor guided me into the living room and onto the couch. He sat down next to me and pulled me close into his arms.

  “What?” he said. “What do you remember?”

  “I was a party member.” I started to tremble. I could not bring myself to say the word Nazi. My revulsion rose physically in my throat. “I swallowed the whole line. I—”

  “That’s enough. I don’t mean to push you too far. This is horrible stuff to remember.”

  “It’s a good thing Lars never found me.” I could barely speak. “He would have hated me, what I was then.”

  “He would have saved you from it.”

  I shook my head no. “I never would have gone with him, not as long as I still believed.”

  “Did you stop believing?”

  “Yes. It was after he—Otto—came back from Dachau. He’d been sent there as a guard for a few months, as a punishment. He came back changed. He told me what he’d seen and heard. He told me the truth. I didn’t want to believe it, but he made me believe it.” I took a deep breath and choked back more tears. “I keep thinking, they would have taken Cynthia, if this were then. I mean, does that make sense? They would have killed my best friend. Jim, too, for race mixing. Isn’t that what they called it?”

  “Oh yeah. Miscegenation. Marry a Jew—verboten.”

  “But at the time, I believed them! Tor, I’ve got to know—I mean—can you forgive me?”

  “For what? Wait, you mean for what you were then?”

  “Yes.” My voice shrank to a whisper. “That.”

  “I can’t forgive you because I don’t blame you.”

  I started to speak, but he laid a gentle finger on my lips

  “Never blame yourself for what happened before you were born.” He took the finger away. “It’s that simple. It’s like your disease. You’re not being punished for something. It’s a whole new problem.”

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah, I am. That was then, this is now, and who knows what drove you to it? Millions of women fell for the Nazi line, the uniforms, the torchlight parades, the runes and the flags. Look at all the women who got pregnant for the sake of the pure Aryan race. It’s not like you were the only one.” He took my hand in both of his. “But I can see why you didn’t want to remember this shit.”

  It was one of those moments when you realize why you love someone. He held me until I could stop weeping.

  It took me until the evening to realize I’d broken through a karmic barrier. I’d faced what I’d feared. I’d seen my old self in the mirror. I hated her, but at least I’d confronted her. Finally I could move forward.

  While Tor worked downstairs, I went into the Burne-Jones bedroom, sat down in the green armchair, and picked up Otto’s book on the Cathar heresy and the Albigensian Crusade in southern France. This was the book about the Grail that had brought him to the attention of the Ahnenerbe SS. Before I settled in to read it properly, I dipped into it here and there, looked at the table of contents to see what was in it, skimmed a few passages. A word caught my attention and led me to a painful treasure.

  Endura. It’s the name of the Cathar fast, forty whole days, mandatory for those who wanted to take the final set of holy vows. People died during it, but in their way of looking at things, such a death was glorious. The Cathars saw nothing wrong with committing suicide when you’d had enough of the life of this world, the life they hated above all else. You weren’t allowed to kill yourself out of boredom, or to get out of debt, but if your life was utterly intolerable, suicide became a holy act that would send you straight to their version of Heaven, the immortal realm of the spirit, the true home and destination of all human souls.

  The lid of the poison casket sprang open. I let the book lie in my lap unread. I was remembering. Most of the images came and went with less order and logic than those in a nightmare. At times I heard voices. There were gaps, big ones. But I remembered the core. He’d killed himself, and Mia wanted to die with him.

  The senior staff had sent Audo as a guard officer to Dachau because they’d finally heard the rumors about his sexuality. The camp showed him what could happen to men who disgraced the SS. He decided that he and Mia might escape from Germany to his friends in Southern France if they could somehow throw off suspicion. Everyone around them thought you could just stop being gay if you tried, kind of like quitting smoking. Stupid, yeah, but when you consider the rest of the insane stuff the Ahnenerbe SS men believed, it’s no surprise. So Audo asked Mia to marry him.

  And she said yes. That I remembered, how oddly happy she was despite the danger all around them, despite how hollow such a marriage would be, a ruse, a part to play, she the adored lady to his chaste knight. He had to get the permission of the Reichsführer, of course. He told her afterwards that Himmler seemed genuinely happy for them, that he’d smiled and congratulated his scholar-officer and wished Mia the best. Looking back on it from my life in California, I found this the most incredible thing of all, that such a cruel man would be so happy for the friend he’d tried to break.

  The dagger struck the next day. When he’d been forced to join the SS, Audo had never filled out the Racial Purity form. He had to do so before he could marry. That night he told Mia his terrible secret. He had a recent Jewish ancestor. He couldn’t lie on the form. The officials would scrutinize every line and demand it be notarized. No one could lie and get away with it. He expected Mia to reject him because of that grandmother or whoever it was, but Mia said no, she’d seen what he’d seen. She told him that she could no longer live in the nation Germany had become, but really, she felt she couldn’t live without him.

  I no longer hated Mia when I remembered the way she’d stayed faithful to him.

  He wanted to die in his beloved mountains. He told her to stay behind, to play a different part, to make a big show of rejecting him as a disgusting Jew after he was safely dead. Safely dead. He used those words a lot, that night. But she went with him. I couldn’t remember the details. They must have kept up the pretence of a happy couple going on holiday to the ski hostel in the Wilderkaiser, the hostel with the medieval bed cabinet and the long view up the snowy slope, bordered by trees.

  At this point, the memories became so vivid that I knew I was reliving them in my mind. I became Mia again for that little space of time. Audo had it all planned out. Death by exposure, hypothermia, relatively painless, especially since he’d brought a bottle of British whiskey along. Drinking in the snow makes you feel warmer, but it actually helps kill you faster. The morning came when, or so I thought, we’d go up the slope together. But he crept out while I was asleep and locked me in. He left a note that said something like I was too young and lovely to die. He apologized for risking me. He told me that he truly loved me.

  I was furious. I remember pounding on the door and yelling until the elderly man who ran the hostel heard me and opened the door. I rushed out of the room and ran for the slope. I could remember how my lungs ached in the cold air and how the snow crunched under my feet. I don’t remember what I was wearing, but I bet they were just ordinary clothes, not even a coat. I saw a dark shape lying part-way up the gentle slope.
I was panting and gasping by the time I reached him. He was already dead, his face a ghastly pale blue color. The empty bottle lay on his chest. Like the fool Mia could be, I stripped off my outer clothing and lay down beside him in the snow. I threw my arms around him one last time and tried to weep, but my breath would not come.

  While I lay cuddled next to his corpse, the snow wraiths arrived. Those I remembered so clearly, the tall misty shapes, human but attenuated, glittering with frost. They had ice-blue eyes that looked down on me in sympathy as they gathered round. When they spoke among themselves their breaths made trails of frost, as if they drew their words with crystals on the still air. One female with long white hair and pale blue lips knelt beside me and laid a hand on my face. Her nails were made of ice, sharp as daggers. I told her I wanted to die. She smiled, nodded, and sank the nails into my throat. She said one word, “Soon.”

  But the old man at the hostel had gone down to the village and rounded up the locals, who came after me, after Audo, too, because the old man had found the note and figured out what was happening. At their approach the wraiths fled. The villagers found me alive, but the she-wraith kept her promise. I caught pneumonia, just like the Cathars who chose death by cold. When I died, I drowned again, this time in a hospital ward, as the disease filled my lungs with fluid, a drop or two at a time.

  I retrieved a clear memory image of a nursing sister in a gray habit, praying the rosary for me as the ward disappeared into darkness. Despite her prayers, the snow wraiths were waiting for me on the other side. As I stepped into the white mists of their world, a male wraith with huge pale eyes came forward to greet me. I recognized the soul who would become my father in my next life. He held out delicate white hands and smiled, revealing teeth like slivers of ice.

  “At last,” he said. “Again.”

  I held out my hands to him—A voice jerked me back to the present moment, into the Burne-Jones bedroom in California.