One day when you, my child, have a child of your own, you will learn what otherwise cannot be taught: that this tiny stranger was fated to appear here, to take its place in this world. This I learned staring at my daughter, Miriam, when she nursed in my wife’s arms. She was frighteningly small, born almost two months early. How precarious she seemed, and yet she too had steered her way through all time to be here.
—
After he took you from the Maison Nôtre Dame, after he brought you to America, to New York, it took me a full year to catch up with him. During that year I traveled first to Canada, much easier to immigrate to than the States. In Québec I met some Basque shepherds from the Ossau Valley in the French Pyrénées, on their way back to ranches in Alberta. Their village in France would have been less than a day’s drive from Nevers, but their dialect was incomprehensible to me. They were by nature suspicious of any non-Basque Frenchman, but in the end I earned their trust. They had cousins working in Wyoming, and so to Wyoming I went on a shepherding visa. Back then, such a thing was possible, encouraged even, and the pay was good. By the end of the second lambing season, I had learned a little English, a little Basque, even a little Spanish from the Mexican farmhands. I had learned enough to permit someone now answering to the Basque name Itzal Etxebarria to work his way into the confraternity of doormen back in New York. I started as a janitor, living at a YMCA, pitching in on garbage days up and down Oppen’s block. I made it known I was always ready to perform odd handyman jobs in his building, always ready to step in when the other doormen were sick. I was ready when a position became available in the building. Why not Itzal? He knows us. He is a stable, trustworthy sort. So they said on the co-op board, agreeing to sponsor me for my green card.
You were three years old then, your father unchanged, save for hair now gray at the temples. He took great care that you would always greet me politely, and in French. Bonjour, Itsy! you would say. Such an agreeable little girl you were. Do you remember it, our little game? Bonjour, Amy! I would say, and you would say, I’m not Amy, Itsy! I’m Emmy! And I would be sure to make the same mistake again, knowing that for my part I would never say, I’m not Itzal Etxebarria, I’m Yves, Yves Levaux, the father of Miriam.
—
The girl, Jessica Burke, your father’s patient: she was the key. A kind girl, but troubled. For her appointments with David Oppen she would often arrive early, and rather than waiting in the little seating area outside his office, she and I would smoke together on the sidewalk. “Señor Itzal,” she would say, accepting my light, “one of the last smokers in New York.” She said, “I want to be a Basque shepherd in Wyoming. Make it happen for me, Itzal!” Because I was a doorman and immigrant, I could ask her anything. Did she have family? (Only her mother.) Did she have a boyfriend? (No. Love was a lie. She lived alone.) What did she need an expensive head-doctor for? “Oh, Itzal,” she would say, “life is complicated, and I don’t have any sheep to talk to. Don’t you miss home?”
—
It was much easier than it had been in Algeria, because the microphones by then were so much smaller. All I had to do was drill a little hole from the basement up through the floor under the couch in David Oppen’s ground-floor office. The tapes I made, I would listen to them into the night, taking notes, erasing them before morning. I began by recording all of his patients, but in time I taped only Jessica Burke. I could not have said what I was listening for, but I knew I had what I needed when she mentioned a poem, a poem she described in detail to him. “The Stolen Child,” it was called, by William Yeats. As for David Oppen, he knew it well. So he said to Jessica Burke. Of course he did. It had been one of Miriam’s favorites; she had performed a setting of it the year before she died.
It was only once I had learned how to wait without knowing why, nor what for, nor for how long, that she was given into my possession. I was working the night shift; it must have been midnight, or a little after. She was desperate, crying, hysterical, and her breath bore a volatile odor. Itzal, she said, you have to help me. At first I thought, insanely, that she had come for my aid, but of course she had come for Dr. Oppen. Itzal, you have to make him. You have to make him come down. You don’t understand. He doesn’t understand.
I said I could call him on the intercom, and she said she had called him already on the telephone, that she had only reached his answering machine. I told her to wait and I would get him. I would go to his apartment. I told her to wait for me on the lobby bench. That is what I said to her, but at his door—at your door—I stopped. I did not knock. The little peephole
