Joseph Kanon - Stardust

“You know what I think?” Mihai said.

“What?”

“Sometimes I think you do this for her. To prove something. I don’t know what.”

Leon was quiet, not answering.

“Do you still talk to her?” Mihai said finally.

“Yes.”

“Tell her we got a boat out. She’ll like that.”

“Past the British patrols?”

“So far. Otherwise we’d be in Cyprus. Tell her three hundred. We saved three hundred.”

He took the same side street back, the same garden entrance. He’d expected to have to ring, but the door was unlocked and he frowned, annoyed the staff had been so careless. But no one was trying to get out and who would want to get in? The clinic was really a kind of nursing home, a place to be out of the way. Dr. Obstbaum had been one of the German refugees welcomed by Ataturk in the thirties to help the new republic get up on its feet. The ones who could afford it had moved to Bebek or, closer in, Ortakoy, where hillsides covered in fir trees and lindens may have reminded them of home. Or maybe, lemminglike, they had simply followed the first settler. Most of the clinic’s medical staff was still German, which Leon had thought might help, her own language something she would understand, if she was still listening. But of course the nurses, the people who bathed her and fed her and chattered around her, were Turkish, so in the end he realized it didn’t matter and now he worried that she was more isolated than ever. Dr. Obstbaum himself encouraged Leon to talk.

“We have no idea what she hears. This form of melancholia- it may be a matter of responding, not awareness. Her brain hasn’t shut down. Otherwise she wouldn’t be breathing, or have any motor functions. The idea is to keep up the level of activity. Over time maybe it grows. So, music. Does she hear it? I don’t know. But the brain does, somewhere. Something functions.”

Not disturbing music, but things she knew, had played at home. Lovely notes to fill the silence in her. If she heard them.

“Most of the time I think I’m talking to myself,” Leon had said.

“Everyone here talks to himself,” Obstbaum had said, a puckish joke. “One of life’s great pleasures, evidently. You at least are being asked.”

“It’s late,” the nurse said in Turkish, a hushed whisper, her eyes glancing down to the water dripping from his coat.

“Is she asleep? I’ll just say good-night. I’m sorry about-”

But the nurse was already opening the door, brusque, the client’s whims no business of hers. He’d sit and talk, the way he always did, and she’d have to check back again, another round, but it was a private clinic and he was paying.

Anna was lying in bed, the room shadowy, only a dim night-light on. When he touched her hand, she opened her eyes, but looked at him without recognition. It was the disconcerting thing, the way her eyes took in what was happening around her without responding. Having her hair brushed, people moving across the room- things happened far away, just little blurs of movement.

“How are you feeling?” he said. “Warm enough? There’s a terrible storm.” He nodded toward the French windows, the sound of rain on the glass.

She didn’t say anything, but he no longer expected her to. Even her hand didn’t touch back. When he talked, he answered for her, silent responses to keep things going. Sometimes, sitting next to her, he’d actually hear her voice in his head, a ghost conversation, even worse than talking to himself.

“But this is nice, isn’t it?” he said, indicating the room. “Cozy. Gemutlich. ” As if a change of language would matter.

He let her hand go and sat down in the chair.

When they first met, she’d never seemed to stop talking, bubbling over, switching from German to English as if one language couldn’t contain it, everything she had to say. And her eyes had been everywhere, ahead of the words sometimes, waiting for them to catch up, lighting up her face. The odd thing was that the face was still her own, stopped in time, the wonderful skin, the soft line of her cheek, everything just the way it always had been, aging itself put off while she was away. Only the eyes were different, vacant.

“I saw Mihai tonight. He sends his love. He said they got a boat through. People are getting out again.” Something that might register, what she cared about. Don’t try to startle her, Obstbaum had said, just ordinary things, domestic matters. But how did Obstbaum know? Had he been to where she lived now? Did it matter to her that Fatma had been ill, sent her sister to do the cleaning? “Three hundred,” he said. “So they must be operating again. Mossad. Who else could it be? A boat that big.”

He stopped. The last thing he should have said, a reminder. Obstbaum thought it had happened then, when the Bratianu sank. Corpses bobbing in the water. Children. Her brain turning away from it, drawing a curtain. Obstbaum had even suggested she be put in a garden room, not a front one facing the Bosphorus, where ships passed all day, each one a possible reminder. Leon had gone along with him. Everyone in Istanbul wanted to see the water- in Ottoman times there had been laws about builders blocking the view- so a garden room was cheaper. And it was pleasant, looking toward the hillside, cypresses and umbrella pines and a Judas tree that dropped pink blossoms in the spring. A fortune back home but something he could manage here. And not a boat in sight.

“I thought I might need Romanian. They bring someone out but they don’t tell you who. They want me to babysit. I got Georg’s old landlord to find me a room. Out near Aksaray. They’ll never think to look in a Muslim neighborhood. And then the weather started up-”

He caught himself, hearing the sound of his voice saying names out loud, telling her what he didn’t want anyone to know, all the slipping away and double-backing for nothing. It occurred to him, one more irony, that since she had gone away they could finally talk to each other. All the things they couldn’t say before, other people’s secrets, now safe to talk about. Some things, anyway. Now there were other drawers you didn’t open, things you didn’t say. Your parents are dead. We haven’t heard, but they must be. They’re not on any lists. You can’t imagine what it was like, how many. The pictures. I see a woman. Just for the sex. It used to feel- wrong- and now I wait for it. Not like us. Something different. I don’t think you’re ever coming back. I can’t say it- can’t say it to you- but I think it’s true. I don’t know why this happened to us. What I did. What you did. Better to keep those drawers closed.

“I ran into Gus Hoover. Socony’s sending him home. You still can’t get a boat, though, so what do you think? They’re putting him on the clipper. Hell of a lot of money, but I guess they’ve got it to spend. Can you see Reynolds doing it for me? Not that I want to go. But you always wanted to, didn’t you? See New York.” He paused, leaving time for an answer. “Maybe when you’re better. We can’t really move you now. Like this. And I can take care of you here.” He motioned his hand to the room. “You could get better here.” He paused again. “Maybe if you’d try. Obstbaum says it isn’t a question of that. But what if it is? You could try. Everything could be the way it was. Better. The war’s over. All the terrible things.” Knowing as he said it that they weren’t over- people still in camps, boats still being turned around, everything she had gone away to escape still happening. What was there to come back for? Him? The drawer he shouldn’t open. Was it my fault? Another casualty of the war, Obstbaum had said, but what if she had left the world to leave him? Something only she knew and wasn’t coming back to answer. Not ever. Gus would fly home, all the others, and he would still be here, talking to himself while she stared at the garden. “You have to be patient,” Obstbaum had said. “The mind is like an eggshell. It can withstand tremendous pressure. But if it cracks it’s not so easy to put it back together.” A Humpty Dumpty explanation, as good as any other, but it was Leon who was sitting here, his world that had been cracked open.