Lost

  Winnie closed her eyes. Ritzi, bless him, said, “Hausserman, she vants ze story.”

  “I’m getting there. Don’t rush me. All right. Assuming a Gervasa—and even Professor Clements isn’t sure why it isn’t Gervase—assuming a Gervasa, she’s a young woman in trouble. In northern France, Normandy probably, in, oh, the thirteenth century. Gervasa seems illiterate. She seems not to know much about the world beyond Normandy, and the hubs of Paris and Würzburg. She’s Catholic down to her dirty fingernails.”

  Slyly Winnie inspected her nails. Bitten, perhaps, but hardly dirty.

  “So Gervasa, if we get it right, is in trouble with the Church. Maybe she’s been caught in adultery. Maybe she’s carrying the child of some nobleman who doesn’t want bastards growing up to claim the family pile or the title. Maybe she killed someone. Who knows. We can’t tell or maybe she doesn’t even know. But here’s the drama, Winnie. You ready? The prelates and curias and the local rabble round her up, and tie her to a stake, and thrust burning ricks of hay at her to make her confess and repent.”

  Ritzi Ostertag shuddered, possessed of his own tremors.

  “So they’re trying to get her to confess, and they promise a Christian burial if she does, and promise to deny her one if she doesn’t. And she confesses, and repents her unnamed crime, but conditionally, because she makes a bargain—this is what she keeps talking about—she says, ‘The baby,’ over and over again.”

  Winnie thought, Well, big fucking surprise, that.

  “Seems,” said Irv, “near as Professor Clements can make out, as if Gervasa has tried to make some bargain. They’re going to kill her anyway, but she’s asked that in return for her repentance, they slice open her belly—this is the knife part that keeps coming up—and save her baby from roasting within her. Sorry, my dear, sorry.” He angled forward to take her hand. “I didn’t want to tell you but you did ask.”

  “She vants to know,” said Ritzi, of Winnie, not of Gervasa, studying her face, “Hausserman, she vants to know if ze baby vas saved or not?”

  “Who wants to know?” said Irv Hausserman.

  “Vinnie,” said Ritzi Ostertag.

  “Gervasa wants to know too,” said Irv. “That’s what it comes down to. She doesn’t know. According to your narrative, she passed from this life and was interred in some charnel house reserved for undecided cases. A Christian burial meant a lot, as I well know from my own studies, and to deny one to a believer was possibly a responsibility a local curate wouldn’t care to take. So there were halfway houses, so to speak, for the bodies of souls who died in extremis, without benefit of the blessing of the Church but without absolute condemnation either.”

  Winnie thought, Hence the statue of the Virgin and Child. Some poor priest or nun knew whose corpse it was, or some old story about it, and left it a totem for comfort. What a correct totem. You didn’t have to be Catholic to know what images of the Madonna and Child must mean to people with sorry, hurried lives, ringed round with so much everyday death.

  “And that’s the it of it,” said Irv.

  Gervasa began to cry, because whatever huge blank pieces of the story were missing, or wrong, there was enough right about it, enough there, to make corroboration possible.

  “Oh, no,” said Ritzi, and came forward. He took Winnie’s hand, rather roughly, and turned over its palm. He ran a finger along a life line and said, “Look, lots of branches here. A fertile vomb. A family line zat doesn’t die out. Don’t cry. Pliss.” It was all a load of bunk, unconvincingly said, and Winnie loved him for it, but she couldn’t stop Gervasa using her eyes to cry.

  “Please,” said Irv. He sat on the bed, rocking Winnie in his arms. “You’re going through too much, you don’t have to do this. You don’t have to have her story in you, you know. You don’t have to.”

  It wasn’t a matter of choice now. Gervasa wouldn’t be quiet until an older nurse came in with the morning pill in a paper cuplet and saw the raw eyes. “Oh, you’re stirring her up?” said the nurse. “Mustn’t do that, chaps.” She gave a sniffy look at Ritzi, and turned a separate variety of disapproval toward Irv. “I’ll call the supervisor and see if we can double the dose this morning. Can I ask you gentlemen to go wander off and have a cup of tea in the caff while I clean up our friend? She’s made a mess of herself by the smell of it.”

  Oh, the shame, she had.

  So, too, she had when she fell off the swing, she remembered now.

  While the nurse cleaned her, Winnie wept with very slow tears that had time to flatten on her face and evaporate.

  “Hang on, I’ll be back in a moment or two,” said the nurse, “you rest up some.”

  When the nurse had left, Winnie turned on her side and pulled her knees up to her womb. The tape recorder began to fall on the floor and she grabbed it. More to silence Gervasa than anything else, Winnie pushed the button to expel the new tape and she inserted the prior one, the one Professor Clements had heard. She rewound it for a few moments and then pressed Play.

  She heard the voice of Gervasa in her voice. It was eerie. Too clipped and precious to stomach, the voice of Gervasa declaimed away urgently in some archaic dialect of French. It sounded, even to Winnie, as if she were making it up, doing some undergraduate exercise in dramatic improv. Were those words her voice? Où est la bibliothèque? was really about all she knew, besides Oooh la la! and the French verse of Lennon and McCartney’s “Michelle.”

  Then the tape ran out, or seemed to, and Winnie was reaching her hand to press Stop when she heard Irv’s voice, recorded. He said, “So that’s it. Impressive, isn’t it?”

  Irv Hausserman must have accidentally pressed Record instead of Stop after the airing of Winnie’s rantings as Gervasa.

  Another voice, an older, smugly polished one. “That’s twice now, but I’ll want to hear it one more time. I pick up a little more each go-round.”

  “You’re holding by your initial outline of the story?”

  “The narrator is consistent in the details, few as they are.”

  “Well, she’s a novelist by trade. She ought to be. What do you make of it, really?”

  “Dr. Hausserman. I’m a linguist, not a psychologist. But I propose either that Ms. Rudge has hidden from you a deeply refined study of Romance languages, more thorough than my own life’s work has been, or that she has had exposure to French at some early stage in her life and is experiencing some wild sort of total recall without knowing it. Has she vacationed on the coast of Normandy? It’s hardly possible I suppose that some old peasant type might have committed to memory some dialectic screed, a patch of local lore, passed on through the generations. And then babbled to a young, impressionable Miss Rudge. Following which, a trauma of some sort is making whole chunks of garbled French regurgitate. No, I am persuading myself not. I don’t know that such a thing is at all possible. But I can’t otherwise diagnose the event. You need someone trained in fields other than my own. I do wonder, however, the nature of your interest.”

  “I can’t help but be fascinated, Professor Clements. I’m fond of the subject—I mean the woman speaking, of course—which is how I come by the tape. But also, inevitably, what a case study for whatever discipline obtains! Leaving aside parapsychology, which I must—”

  “As must we all.”

  “The notion of a delusion so systemic that it can corrupt the language templates—I’m not sure what if anything has been written on this before. A sort of organized glossolalia.”

  “Well, Miss Rudge has a highly active imagination. As you’ve indicated. I leave the diagnosis and therapy to my betters. I’m eager to hear some of this recording once more before my afternoon tutorial requires my attention. I hate to admit it’s giving me notions about medieval grammar that I hadn’t entertained. If we might?”

  “Of course. Is there a diagnostician you might recommend in the field of—” Here the tape went silent.

  The bastard. Talking about her over her head, behind her back. She knocked the tape recorde
r on the floor as she sat up suddenly. The hatch flew open and the tape sprang out. She kicked it under the bed, then, thinking better of it, got down on her hands and knees and reclaimed it. She stuffed it in her pocketbook, which mercifully had not been confiscated by the hospital staff. With shaking hands she clawed open the clasp. There were her keys, her wallet, her passport, her makeup, the essentials. She rammed the cassette in and stood up. Her clothes had been laundered and folded. She dressed herself as best she could, finding herself weak in the limbs, and, looking this way and that down the corridor, made for the elevators.

  Once there, she found Gervasa unwilling to press the button. Shakily she took the stairs instead, hoping not to meet Irv and Ritzi on their way back from the cafeteria.

  She’d grab a cab and go to John’s. But though a London taxi stopped at her frantic wave, and she wrenched the door open, Gervasa wouldn’t let her enter. There was a great balking in her spine, a terror in the temples and jaw. She brayed in impenetrable coarse syllables, and the driver said, “Not in my vehicle, luv,” and drove away. So she walked up the hill, carefully crossing at the zebra stripes, training her eyes on the paving stones, trying to keep her voice down.

  She rang Mrs. Maddingly’s bell. No answer. Mrs. Maddingly was probably still recuperating in some dingy room at the hospital Winnie had just left. She rang John’s bell and then, though she had trouble working the key, she let herself in. John wasn’t there but the new staircase was. She mounted it and found herself on top of Rudge House, looking out over sunny London in—what was it now? Early December? How long had she slept? Look, Gervasa, she said, with some small sense of pride despite the general horror of everything. Look what we’ve done with the world.

  Oh oh oh, said Gervasa, and this time in English. But how could Winnie tell the difference? She supposed that Gervasa merely seemed—closer.

  “No,” said Winnie, “I’m not hearing voices, please.”

  Oh, tell it me, said Gervasa.

  “I have nothing to tell you, I just want you to look, and despise it or love it, as you will.”

  Gervasa made no promise.

  “What crime did you commit, that they put you to death for it?”

  Gervasa didn’t understand or didn’t care to answer. “Was it murder, that you could not be buried in a Christian plot? Who did you kill? Why? You murderer, still at your task! When you were Chutney, you killed his companions. When you were Mrs. Maddingly you turned and killed Chutney. Who will you kill now that you are me?”

  A cat needs to eat, and that cat was locked up. It could find no food on its own. The old woman gave it no food. It had to eat.

  “Cats don’t eat each other. They don’t.”

  Gervasa did not reply. Cats kill mice and birds, everyone knew. And Chutney, Gervasa seemed to imply, had been slightly more than a cat when it went on the hunt.

  “And then you killed Chutney when you were Mrs. Maddingly. How come?”

  A woman needs to eat, and that woman was locked up. She could find no other food.

  “Roasting a cat?”

  Again, no reply. Perhaps Gervasa had caused Mrs. Maddingly to kill the cat, but Mrs. Maddingly on her own was wacky enough to choose an appropriate recipe.

  “Did you kill someone over food? To keep yourself and your baby from starving? Who will you kill now that you are me? Are you determined to slay every living creature in this house? Is Mrs. Maddingly going to die? Is John safe? Is Allegra, over the party wall? Did you go into Allegra’s house and mark your hand in her plaster of Paris? In whose body did you dress? Is Allegra safe? Is Rasia?”

  Rasia and the children. Winnie was thoroughly confused; what if the Gervasa in her made an attack on the children? Out of some mad fit of revenge? She loped across the flat roof to see if she could jump across to the roof of the abutting building, but as Mac and Jenkins had seen before her, there was no access to a window or door from the roof area.

  “I won’t let you do it. I won’t let you attack Rasia or her children, I won’t,” said Winnie. “I don’t care what vendetta you are conducting. I’ll get to them before you do.”

  Gervasa began to chortle and protest in her own language, and Winnie grabbed the chance to duck out, as if, vain thought, she could outrun Gervasa. She took the stairs at a gallop, pounding her heels till they sang with pain. Gervasa’s odd words could hardly keep up; Winnie pictured them streaming up behind her as if printed on streamers, drawn by Edward Gorey to accompany one of his hellish visions.

  Life is distracting and uncertain,

  She said, and went to draw the curtain.

  She passed the estate agent, what’s-his-name, in the hall, showing a fair English rose of a girl into the vacant flat. Gervasa shrieked at them both, and the estate agent put his big shoulder up in the doorway to try to shield the client from the sight. “She’s training for the All-Europe marathon, they shriek like barbarians, part of the program,” he said as the door slammed behind him.

  Winnie was out on the street, her pocketbook flapping against her side, which was beginning to hurt. What if during all those sleepy hours at the Royal Free, Gervasa had woken up, like Dr. Jekyll and Lady Hyde, and had gone murderously back to Rudge House and its Rowancroft Gardens neighbor?

  She rang the bell. One of the children answered through the intercom. “Darling, it’s Auntie Allegra from the garden flat,” said Winnie, breathing hard, in her best English accent. “Do buzz me in, I need to borrow a spoon.”

  “Uh,” said the child doubtfully, but did as he was told.

  She heaved and panted, using her arms like a gorilla’s natural grappling hooks, hauling herself up the staircase. The door was open a crack and a flimsy chain was on it. Gervasa and Winnie felt they had the strength of two people; the chain gave way as if it were made of cheap plastic.

  “Mummy,” cried the boy. He tossed his play telephone on the floor and backed away. From her receiving blanket in front of the television the baby looked up and gurgled.

  “Get out,” said Winnie, as sweetly as she could.

  “Who is it?” called Rasia from the other room, her voice strong and fearful. She came in with a skillet in her hand, dropping bits of frying onion. The air was redolent with turmeric and crushed coriander and sizzling ghee.

  The boy had grabbed the baby and retreated by the time Rasia was able to take it all in. “What are you doing here?”

  “Get out, get out before I kill you all, get out. Get out.”

  “You get out, you bitch.” Rasia went at her with the skillet. “Bloody hell. This is my house and you’re not invited.”

  Winnie fell to one knee and deflected the skillet with her forearm, which sounded as if it shattered. She grabbed what she could in defense—the plastic portable phone—and held it out entreatingly. “Rasia, listen: for your safety and your kids: get out, leave the house! Get out.” Gervasa took over, arguing one side or another of the case, Winnie couldn’t tell.

  “Navida, ring 999, tell them to come at once.”

  The skillet slid out of Rasia’s hands and hit the wall, spattering it with grease. Winnie grabbed it, to show she didn’t want to hurt anyone, and hurtled it out the window, removing it from the field of operations. “Please leave,” said Winnie, “I don’t want to hurt anyone. Please.” She was weeping. But part of her wanted to kill Rasia and her son so she could get to the baby and hold it, just once.

  Then the girl was there, the oldest child, with a revolver in her hand, and the boy and the baby huddled behind. “Get out of our house,” said the girl coldly. The revolver was probably as plastic as the telephone, but something in Winnie was stopped, mercifully, and she turned and left the house, moving more slowly now so as to catch her breath. She could hear Rasia crumpled on the floor of the living room, weeping.

  She went to Waterloo Station and bought a one-way ticket to France via the Eurostar. “No luggage to check?” asked the attendant.

  “None,” said Winnie. “I’ll shop in Paris for a new wardrobe.”
>
  STAVE FIVE

  For the Time Being

  there was little to do but lean against the wall and breathe in, breathe out, as if breath were a rare enough commodity to bother cherishing. The train was scheduled to leave at 15:23. It had been hard for Winnie to get Gervasa to Waterloo, down into the catacombs of the Tube, but Winnie had taken the upper hand as best she could, and people, she saw, gave her the widest possible berth. Appearing to be talking to yourself clears the way, she observed. And yelling does it more efficiently still.

  She thought to look at the ticket. The twelfth of December. How had the time passed? She’d come to London more than a month ago. Two weeks or so spent in wrestling the reduced spirit of Gervasa out into the open. Was it true that Gervasa had resisted coming? Once upon a time Winnie had guessed some dim ghost of Jack the Ripper, reluctant to kill again. The falling chimney pot, all that stage business. Off. Way off.

  Something didn’t sit right with Winnie, and as the well-dressed travelers began to assemble themselves in the departure lounge of the Eurostar, off to do holiday shopping or have a dirty weekend in Paris, Winnie caught sight of what it was. According to Irv Hausserman, the ghosts of the past were usually of some renown, at least to the scribes who snatched their tales out of the air. What were the miracles of saints but the rough music of the good and the blessed still rousing folks up to betterment? And old sinners and reprobates had to be high-born in order to be remembered. But who cared for a dead pregnant peasant woman from six, seven hundred years ago? Someone who had left no mark, probably left no issue, surely disturbed history in no memorable way?