“No—I mean, maybe I would have believed it, maybe I would have convinced myself, if it wasn’t for the other letter you brought.”
The other letter: Spurlock had been so preoccupied with whether to give her Oppen’s confession that he had forgotten about the other letter, the one in the blue airmail envelope.
“What did it say?” he asked.
For several seconds she said nothing. Finally, she took the envelope from the pocket of her jeans. She tore open the flap, withdrew a sheaf of light pages, and began to read.
Mon cher enfant—
Why had he not considered that it would be in French? He remembered the day, years earlier, when she had appeared in the church and unfolded that first sheet of paper, the sheet on which he had seen his own name caught in the snare of a language he had never spoken.
“I’ll translate as I go along,” she said.
“ ‘My dear child,’ ” she began.
I would spare you the story, but it is not fair that you remain uninformed, and I am a fair man. Do your hands tremble, holding these pages sent to you by a stranger? You see how mine tremble too, writing these words, and not only because I am an old man. I can feel how death grows impatient of my dawdling. You will understand how strange it is for me to address you in this manner, strange because you are in fact no stranger to me. After all, dear child, I have known you since the day you were born.
—
I say death grows impatient of my dawdling. Perhaps I am the impatient one. I have never feared death; indeed, he has been my faithful companion. He was my playmate, looking with me through the magnifying glass at the ants I burned up in the sun. He crouched with me beside the first hare I shot as the last flutter of life departed the small body. He was my steadfast comrade in the Algerian war, where I served in the Signal Corps. There we were inseparable, and he never faltered, never rested.
But then he took my young wife, the mother of my only child, and next, as though this too were his right, my daughter too, my Miriam.
You see, child, how age has taken from me any scruple for what I say.
You never knew her, my Miriam. She drowned before you were born. It was as though death were jealous that I should presume to make a life for myself, for my little family, enraged that after the obscenity of Algeria I should clothe myself in respectability as Maître Levaux, solicitor, in the provincial city of Nevers. Me! Maître Levaux, who had been death’s agent and his entrepreneur, all through the battle for Algiers, or in the CRA at Constantine, who with the most rudimentary objects—a coil of wire, a bucket of water—could anticipate and satisfy his most extravagant desires. It was as though he was saying: I will not permit you to abandon me.
I did not ask why he chose me. He loved me, I thought, because I loved justice, and I could not love justice without loving him as well. It was as though he said: I made you; you cannot leave me.
“It is— He is Miriam’s father,” she said, looking at Spurlock in wonder before turning back to the pages.
My daughter, Miriam, you never knew her.
I kept asking her, is it someone, and she kept saying, it is everything. You are pregnant, I said, and she knew that I knew, but she said no, no, no, no one, it was impossible. I said it must be someone: you are carrying someone’s child. She said that I must stop, that one could not choose, that no one could choose who or what one loved.
This of course proved that she had been alienated from her senses.
Did he abandon you, I asked, and she said, everyone abandons everyone, and anyway it’s not anyone, it’s not anything, it is everything.
For a moment then I thought it would be all right, that it was only one of her spells. She had always had spells. Her attempt to kill herself, she had said it was an error, an accident, that it could never happen again. She promised me it would never happen again. She said: I could not give it to you lightly, my word of honor. And I who have never believed anyone believed her, because she was my daughter. She embraced me and said she was sorry and asked would I forgive her? Would I promise? I said—and it was the last thing I ever said to her—there was nothing to forgive.
Then she had gone. In two days they found me and gave me the news.
—
I went immediately to Nevers. My inquiries there were brief and straightforward. Yes, said the shopkeeper at the hardware store in Nevers, the girl had come in and purchased a great length of chain. The police had inquired as well, and a tall Dutchman had come in too, not long after, looking for chain, just like the girl had. Maybe he had been English. Yes, he could have been American. He was drunk and had frightened her. In the end, all he had bought was a hammer and chisel.
Others had seen him too, I discovered, in the place Carnot, on the rue Saint-Étienne. An American of his description had taken a tent site at the campground across the river, a notable fact, because the nights were still cold.
Within days I had learned all there was to learn. The man was David Oppen, an American. It was not, as she had said, anyone or everything, but a specific person, an American, a man named David Oppen.
David Oppen. I say the name now, and it is just as intolerable as it was a quarter
