Galilee

  My mother, of course. I’m sorry, my father’s wife. (It’s strange, and probably significant, that I think of her as my mother whenever I picture her more peaceful aspects. The warrior Cesaria Yaos is my father’s wife.) Anyway, it was she, no doubt. Who else had a voice that could express the rage of a baboon, a leopard and a hippopotamus in one rise and fell swoop?

  But what was she so furious about? I wasn’t entirely certain I wanted to find out. There was some merit in retreat, I thought. But before I could about turn and creep back to my room I saw Marietta running down the hallway, with what appeared to be an armful of garments. You’ll recall that the last time we two had spoken we’d parted furious with one another, she having commented less than favorably on my work. But I think even if we’d been bosom buddies she would not have halted at that moment. Cesaria’s menagerie noises were escalating by the second.

  As Marietta ducked out of sight, I did what I’d been planning to do ten seconds before, and turned around so as to head back to my room. Too late. I’d barely taken a step when the noises ceased all at once, every last howl, only to leave room for Cesaria’s other voice; her human voice, which is—I’m sure I’ve told you—nothing short of mellifluous.

  “Maddox,” she said.

  Shit, I thought.

  “Where are you going?”

  (Isn’t it strange, by the way, that we’re never too old to feel like errant children? There I was, old by any human standards, frozen in my tracks and guilty as any infant caught with sticky fingers.)

  “I was going back to my work,” I said. Then added, “Mama,” as a sop.

  It may have mellowed her. “Is it going well?” she asked me, quite conversationally. I was sufficiently reassured to turn round and look at her, but she wasn’t visible to me. There was just a busy darkness at the far end of the hallway where moments before there’d been a well-lit lobby. I was frankly grateful. I’ve never actually witnessed the form my mother takes in these legendary furies of hers, but I’m quite sure it’s sufficient to drop a saint in his tracks.

  “It’s going okay,” I replied. “I have days when—”

  Cesaria broke in before I got any further. “Did Marietta go outside?” she said.

  “I . . . yes . . . yes, I believe she did.”

  “Fetch her back.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re not deaf, Maddox. Go find your sister and bring her back inside.”

  “What happened?”

  “Just fetch her.”

  (There’s another second strangeness here, worth remarking on. Just as there’s a guilty child lurking in everyone, there’s also a rebellious self that prickles at the idea of being ordered about, and is not easily silenced. It was this voice that answered Cesaria back, foolish though it was to do so.)

  “Why can’t you go and fetch her yourself?” I heard myself saying.

  I knew I was going to regret the words even as I spoke them. But it was already too late to recant: Cesaria’s shadow self was in motion. She was moving—not quickly, but steadily, inevitably—down the hallway toward me. Though the ceiling is not especially high, there was something vast about her manifestation; she seemed like a thunderhead at that moment. And I diminished to a fraction of myself before her; I was a mote, a sliver—She began to speak as she approached, but every word she uttered seemed about to collapse back into that terrible cacophony of hers; as though she was only keeping anarchy at bay with the greatest effort.

  “You,” she said “remind me” I knew what was coming “of your father.”

  I don’t believe I said anything by way of reply. I was frankly too intimidated. Besides, if I’d tried to speak I doubt my tongue would have worked. I simply stood there as she roiled before me, and the animal din erupted out of her with fresh ferocity.

  This time, however, there was a vision to go with the din, not uncovered by the cloud but seemingly sculpted from it. I had a mercifully short glimpse of it, though I’m certain that had Cesaria not wanted me to be her errand boy she might have given me more. That wasn’t to her present purpose, however, so she showed me just enough to make me lose control of my bladder; perhaps three or four seconds’ worth, if that. What did I see? It’s no use telling you there are no words. Of course there are words; there are always words. The question is: can I wield them well enough to evoke the power of what I witnessed? That I doubt. But let me do my best.

  I saw, I think, a woman erupting at every pore and orifice; spewing unfinished forms. Giving birth, I suppose you’d say, expelling not one, nor even ten, but a thousand creatures; ten thousand. And yet here’s the problem with that description. It doesn’t take account of the fact that at the same time she was becoming—how do I express this?—denser; like certain stars I’ve read about, which as they collapse upon themselves draw light and matter into them. So was she. How did my mind deal with the fact that she was doing two contrary things? Not well. In fact the vision did such violence to my system I fell down as though she’d struck me, and covered my head with my hands as though she might get the sight into me again through the top of my skull.

  She chose to spare me. Just left me lying on the ground in my wet pants, sobbing. It took me a little time to recover my composure, but when I finally raised my head and chanced a look in her direction, I found that the thunderhead was no longer looming over me. She’d covered that furious face of hers and was waiting some little distance from me.

  “I’m sorry . . .” were the first words out of my mouth.

  “No,” she said, her voice suddenly drained of either music or strength. “It was my fault. You’re not a child to be ordered around. It was just that in that moment I saw your father so clearly.”

  “May . . . I . . . ask you a question?”

  “Ask anything,” she said, sighing.

  “That face I just saw . . .”

  “What about it?”

  “Did Nicodemus ever see it?”

  Despite her fatigue she was amused by this. There was a hint of a smile in her voice when she replied. “Are you asking me if I scared him off?” I nodded. “Then I’ll tell you: that face, as you call it, is what he chiefly loved me for.”

  “Really?” I must have sounded astonished—as indeed I was—because she replied somewhat defensively:

  “He had aspects that were just as terrible.”

  “Yes I know.”

  “Of course you know. You saw some of what he could do.”

  “But that wasn’t all he was,” I said.

  “Just as what you saw a moment ago isn’t all of me.”

  “But it’s the truest part, isn’t it?” I said. Under other circumstances I surely wouldn’t have pressed her on this business so closely, but I knew the chances of my having the freedom to interrogate her like this again were nil. If I was to know who Cesaria Yaos was before the house of Barbarossa came crashing down, it was now or never.

  “The truest part?” she said. “No. I don’t think I have one face that’s truer than any other. I used to be worshipped in dozens of temples, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “They’re all heaps of rubble now. Nobody remembers how I was loved . . .” Her voice trailed off. She’d apparently lost her point. “What was I saying?”

  “Nobody remembering.”

  “Before that.”

  “All the temples—”

  “Oh yes. So many temples, with statues and embroideries, all depicting me. But not one of them resembled any other.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because I visited them,” she said. “When your father and I had a spat we’d go our separate ways for a while. He’d go find himself some poor woman to seduce, and I’d go touring my holy sites. It’s comforting when you’re feeling a little woebegone.”

  “Hard to imagine.”

  “What? Me, woebegone? Oh I can be self-pitying, just like anybody else.”

  “No. I meant it’s hard to imagine how it must feel, going into a temple where y
ou’re being worshipped.”

  “Oh it can be wonderful. Wandering among your devotees.”

  “Were you ever tempted to tell them who you were?”

  “I did it many, many times. I usually picked somebody who wasn’t a particularly reliable witness. The very old. The very young. Somebody with a sanity problem, or a saint, which is often one and the same.”

  “Why do that? Why not show yourself to somebody literate, intelligent? Somebody who could spread your gospel?”

  “Somebody like you?”

  “If you like.”

  “Is that what your book’s going to be: one last desperate attempt to put your father and me back up on our pedestals?” What did she want to hear from me? I wondered. And if I chose incorrectly, would I be subjected to her fury again? “Is that what you’re up to, Maddox?”

  I decided on the truth. “No,” I said, “I’m simply telling the story as best I can.”

  “And this conversation? Will it be in your book?”

  “I’ll put it in if it seems relevant.”

  There was a silence. Finally, she said: “Well, I suppose it doesn’t matter whether you do or you don’t. Stories; temples. Who cares nowadays? You’re going to have fewer readers than I have worshippers, Maddox.”

  “I don’t have to be read to be a writer,” I pointed out.

  “And I don’t have to be worshipped to be a goddess. But it helps. Believe me, it helps.” She made a phantom smile, and I—to my great surprise—returned it. We understood one another better at that moment than we ever had. “So, now . . . Marietta.”

  “One more question,” I begged.

  “No, enough.”

  “Please, Mama. Just one. For the book.”

  “One then. And only one.”

  “Did my father have temples?”

  “He certainly did.”

  “Where were they?”

  “That’s another question, Maddox. But, as you’re so curious . . . The finest of his temples to my way of thinking was in Paris.”

  “Really? Paris. I thought Nicodemus hated Paris.”

  “Later, he did. It’s where I met Mr. Jefferson, you see.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “There’s a great deal about that man you don’t know; that the world doesn’t know. I could tell you enough about him to fill five books. He was such a charmer. But quiet . . . so quiet when he talked that you had to strain to hear him. I remember the first time I met him he’d just been given an apricot, which he’d never tasted before. And oh, the blissful look on that pinched face of his! I wanted him to make love to me on the spot.”

  “Did he?”

  “Oh no. He played very hard to get. He was in love with an English actress at the time. What a wretched combination that was: English and an actress. The worst of all possible worlds. Anyway, Thomas toyed with my affections for weeks. There was a revolution going on around us, but I swear I was so besotted with him I barely noticed. Heads being topped off every hour and I was wandering around in an adolescent daze trying to find a way to make this scrawny little American diplomat love me.”

  “How did you do it?”

  “I’m not sure I ever did. If I were to raise him up now, out of his grave at Monticello, and say to him: did you love me? I think he’d say, at best, for a day or two, an hour or two, that afternoon you showed me the temple.”

  “You took him to my father’s temple?”

  “Every woman knows if you fail to get the man you want with words, you show him a sacred place.” She laughed. “Usually it’s the one between your legs. Don’t look so shocked, Maddox. It’s a fact of life. If a woman’s going to get a man on his knees, she has to give him something to worship. But I knew raising my skirts for Jefferson wasn’t going to be enough. He’d had that from his tarty little actress, Miss Cosway. I had to show him something that she could never supply. So I took him to your father’s temple.”

  “What happened?”

  “He was very impressed. He asked me how I knew about the place. It was a very secret cult your father had at that time. Noble families, mostly. And of course they’d either fled or lost their heads. So the temple was deserted. We wandered around while the mobs raged on the streets outside, and I think—just for that little while—he was quite in love.

  “I remember he asked me who’d designed the place, and I took him to the altar, where there was a statue of your father. It had a red velvet cloth draped over it. And I said to Jefferson: before I show you this, will you promise me something? He said yes, of course, if it was in his power. So I said to him: design me a house, where I can live happily, because it’ll remind me of you.”

  “So that’s how you got him to design you this place?”

  “I made him swear. On his wife. On his dreams of Monticello. On his dearest hopes for democracy. I made him swear on them all.”

  “You didn’t trust him?”

  “Not remotely.”

  “So he swore—”

  “—and I uncovered your father’s statue. There he was in all his tumescent glory!” Again she laughed. “Oh, Thomas was the very picture of discomfort. But to be fair to him, he kept his aplomb and asked me, with great seriousness, if the representation was a true and proportionate likeness. I reassured him that it was an exaggeration, though not much of one. I remember exactly what he said to that. ‘Then I am certain, ma’am, you are a very contented wife.’ Ha! ‘A very contented wife.’

  “I showed him how contented I was, there and then. With your father’s painted eyes looking down at us, I showed Jefferson how little I cared for marriage.

  “We never did it again. I didn’t really want to, and I’m quite certain he didn’t. His affair with the actress ended in tears, and he went back to his wife.”

  “But he built you your house, just as he promised he would.”

  “Oh he did more than that,” she said. “He also built a perfect copy of the temple. Perfect down to the last detail.”

  “Why?”

  “That’s another question for his ghost. I don’t know. He was a strange man. Beautiful things obsessed him. And the temple was beautiful.”

  “Did he put an altar in it?”

  “Do you mean did he have a statue of your father? I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Where was this place?”

  “Where is it, you mean.”

  “It’s still standing?”

  “I believe so. It’s one of the best kept secrets in Washington.”

  “Washington . . .” The thought that there was a place of ritual sacred to my perpetually priapic father laid in the heart of the nation’s capitol astonished me. “I want to see it,” I said.

  “I’ll write a letter of introduction,” Cesaria said.

  “To whom?”

  She smiled. “To the highest in the land. I’m not entirely forgotten,” she said. “Jefferson made certain I would never want for influence.”

  “So he knew you’d outlive him?”

  “Oh yes, he understood perfectly, though he never put what he knew into words. I think that would have been too much for him.”

  “Mother . . . you astonish me.”

  “Do I really?” she said, with something approximating fondness in her voice. “Well I’m pleased to hear it.” She shook her head. “Enough of this,” she said. “I’m quite talked out.” She pointed at me. “And you be careful how you quote me,” she said. “I won’t have my past misrepresented, even if it is in a book that nobody’s going to read.”

  So saying, she turned her back on me, and calling her porcupines to follow, she headed off down the passageway. I called after her:

  “What do you want me to do about Marietta?”

  “Nothing,” she growled. “Let her play. She’ll regret what she’s done. Maybe not tonight, but soon.”

  While I was pleased to be relieved of the duty of going after Marietta, I was left somewhat curious as to the felony my half-sister had committed. Indeed I was tempted to
seek her out and ask her for myself. But I had such a wonderful freight of information from Cesaria, and I didn’t want to risk forgetting a word of it. So I went straight back to my room, lit the lamps, poured myself some gin, and started to set it down. I paused only once, to reflect on what it might mean that Thomas Jefferson, the principal architect of the Declaration, the father of democracy in America, should have built a replica of my father’s temple. To have gone to all that trouble in pursuit of beauty seemed to me unlikely. Which begged two questions: one, why had he done it? And two, if there was some other purpose, did anybody on Capitol Hill know what it was?

  VIII

  i

  I will revisit Marietta’s theft in due course; be assured of that. There are several threads of this tapestry woven together in her crime as you’ll see. And—just as Cesaria predicted—there would be consequences.

  But first, I must return to The Samarkand, and the pair who’d passed the night upon it.

  When Rachel woke, dawn was creeping into the tiny cabin, and by its virtuous light she saw Galilee asleep at her side, one arm thrown over his face, the other across her body. Comforted by the sight, she closed her eyes and went back to sleep. When she stirred again, he was gently stroking her breasts, kissing her face. Still only half-awake she slid her hand down between their bodies and raised her leg a little to guide him into her. He murmured something against her cheek that she didn’t catch, but she was in too dreamy a state to ask him to repeat it. All she wanted was the fullness of him inside her; his gentle motion, his touch. She didn’t even need to see him: he was there in her mind’s eye when she closed her lids; her perfect lover, who’d brought her more sexual pleasure in one night than she’d experienced in all the years preceding it. She reached out and touched his chest, his nipples, then to his armpit and the mass of his shoulder, luxuriating in the polished muscle beneath her fingertips. One of his huge hands was at her face, stroking her with the back of his fingers, the other down between her legs, parting her, easing the passage of his sex by spreading her fluids down its length.

  She made a little sob of pleasure when he was fully housed; begged him to stay there. He didn’t move. Just kept his place, her body enclosing him so tightly she could feel the tick of his blood. At last, she began to move; just a tiny motion at first, but enough to send a shudder through him.