The Bestiary (29 page)

I told her about the
Makara,
my father’s death, my travels.

After listening intently, she said, “It’s funny. I never thought you would be like him. I mean, you’re not, really. It’s just that you seem so rootless. No wife or children, no real home.”

“I have a home.”

There was an awkward silence.

“And you’re still looking for that book?” she said.

“Yes.”

A boy in a blue jacket, a book bag over his shoulder, entered the restaurant. He was about ten, with long black hair and a serious gaze. I was startled when he ran straight to Evgénia and she embraced him.

“Xeno, this is Philip, Reza’s son,” she said. “Philip, this is Xeno.”

He looked at me, his mind elsewhere, and we shook hands.

“I’ve known Xeno since he was a little boy,” Evgénia went on. “He was good at history, just as you are.”

“What kind of history do you like?” I said, finding my voice.

“Oh, British and Canadian.” He turned back to Evgénia. “Is Mom in the kitchen?”

“Remind you of someone?” she smiled, as he hurried off.

“I can see he reminds you.”

“He’s a good boy. Reza is divorced, so she leaves him with me when she goes out.” She leaned over and kissed my cheek. “Of all the children I cared for, Xeno, you were like my own.”

She walked me outside and I hailed a taxi. The driver put my suitcase in the trunk.

“You’re only twenty-six,” Evgénia said. “Who knows, you may end up with five children. And find your book, too.”

A book that might no longer exist, I thought, as Evgénia, waving, receded through the rear window of the taxi. And if that was so, what would I do? Maybe I was more like Madame Faville than I thought, and it was glory I was after, not enlightenment.

7

D
ID YOU THINK
I tried to kill someone?” Lena said sharply.

She was wearing a striped smock and rubber gloves and had just finished cleaning the cages of four dozen formerly white, now furless, rabbits that had been rescued after a successful lawsuit against a cosmetics company by the organization she worked for, International Refuge. We were in the basement clinic of their headquarters on the rue de Siam, in Passy. In their cages, dogs were barking, cats howling. There was a tiger cub abused by a drug gang; monkeys that had survived a gruesome psychological experiment after being injected with LSD; and a scrawny goat, branded with hot irons, that had been rescued from a voodoo cult.

“I made mistakes,” she went on. “That’s why I’m here. But I never hurt anyone.”

“I didn’t say you did.”

“You didn’t have to.”

I took her arm. “Lena, I’m not judging you.”

“Then stop looking at me like that,” she said, pulling away.

I had spent several weeks tracking her down at the clinic, and from the moment I walked in the door, she had been angry with me. First surprised, then angry.

She stowed the smock and gloves in a locker, put on a blue raincoat over her plain blue dress, and led me to the elevator. I returned my security pass to the guard, and we went out the back door, onto a gray side street.

“You want to find some real killers?” Lena went on. “Visit the biology labs: they maim and vivisect animals by the hundreds. With the dogs they sever the vocal cords first. They experiment on pregnant animals, shelter animals, newborns. So-called wildlife preserves? Poachers have the run of them. The food industry? You don’t want to go there.”

At twenty-five, she had the same choirgirl face, but her eyes were as fierce as her voice, their deep gray at once more opaque and less mysterious than when she was a girl. Her enviable reserve had been eroded; now she just seemed defensive, wary, coiled at her center. At least, that was the side of herself she was showing me. I hadn’t seen her in three years, and though thinner and paler, she was still beautiful. She wore no makeup. Her blonde hair remained thick, but it was carelessly combed. Her fingernails were bitten down, and she had a bruise on her left forearm. One of her front teeth was chipped.

“That happened in prison,” she said, catching my glance. “A bull dyke hit on me. That’s what I’ve become, Xeno. What my father used to call ‘the dregs.’ I haven’t fixed the tooth because I don’t want to forget.”

We stopped at a drab café. There were four metal tables on the sidewalk and we were the only customers. A nearby wall was covered with graffiti in Arabic. Two boys were kicking a ball against it.

Lena downed her espresso. “So here I am. The French have no problem allowing me to be employed. Their animal rights organizations have real clout. I read about International Refuge in prison. Then I sent them a letter. Looking back, I caught a lucky break when I was busted. Not because I saw the error of my ways,” she added defiantly. “I’ve never regretted that night. I’m still trying to do what I know best, and it’s nice to get results.” She shrugged. “You can’t stop all the suffering, but you also can’t give up.”

“It sounds like you’re doing a lot of good over here,” I said. “Would you ever want to do it back home?”

She tilted her empty cup this way and that. “I couldn’t go back if I wanted to. I violated my probation.” She nodded at my surprise. “I’m afraid Bruno doesn’t know that part of the story,” she said drily. “The judge put me on probation for two years. In Portland I was supposed to report in twice a week. Forget it. Even before prison, I’d been itching to leave the country. I took a bus to Vancouver, then flew to Quebec. So now I’m an expat—like you,” she smiled, not pleasantly. “The difference is, I’m also a fugitive. I could be extradited to Oregon from any of the other forty-nine states, and they’d put me back in jail. The FBI isn’t going to come after me here—this isn’t a case for Interpol. Maybe in a few years it will all blow over. Meanwhile, I have a job. A place to live. The French don’t give a damn what you did in America.”

Her voice was so hard. “Lena, what can I do?”

“Do? Nothing. You’ve helped me more than enough,” she added with a frown. “You put me through college, remember?”

“I didn’t just mean money.”

“What then? Please, don’t tell me you came here to rescue me.”

“Why would I want to do that? You seem fine.”

She wagged her finger mockingly. “Maybe this is a bit of a problem—you know, because when you were a kid you wanted someone to rescue you.”

That smarted, coming from her. “It’s not the worst vice: it’s what you do for a living now, right?”

“That’s different,” she snapped. “Bruno is into numbers and you’re into magic, but there are animals out there being wiped out.
Real
animals, not imaginary ones.”

“Would you tell me, please, why you’re so goddamn pissed at me?”

“I’m not pissed at you.”

“Come on, Lena. We’ve known each other too long.”

She flushed. “Maybe we have.” She pushed her chair back and stood up. “Too long.” And she walked away.

“Lena!”

I threw some money on the table and hurried after her, but she had disappeared in a taxi.

My hands were shaking. My first impulse was to follow her, but I decided it would be better if I waited and called her the next day at International Refuge. It turned out I didn’t have to.

That night, at two-thirty, I had just fallen asleep when my buzzer rang. She was at the door in her blue raincoat, the collar turned up. Her hair was windblown, her eyes tired. She barely managed a smile.

“How did you find me?” I said, tying the sash on my bathrobe.

“You’re in the directory.”

Ushering her in, I tried to gather my thoughts—and to read hers. But her expression revealed little.

I took her coat, and she looked around. By now, one wall of my living room was lined floor-to-ceiling with books. Papers were stacked on the desk. Through the window, a blue mist hung over the Square du Temple. The small pond at the end of the park shone like a mirror.

Lena walked to the window and stared down. I switched on the lamps and waited, but she didn’t move.

Finally she said, “Have you lived here long?”

“Less than a year.”

“I read the plaque across the street that says the Square du Temple was once a separate country.”

“Yes, a kind of ministate, like Monaco.”

Beneath her calm I sensed she was nervous, gathering her thoughts before she said what she came to say.

“It belonged to the Knights Hospitallers,” I continued, trying to give her more time, “and was separated from the rest of the city by a drawbridge. The Knights built a fortress, a church, a hospice, even a prison. The prison lasted up until the Revolution. Louis XVI spent his last night in it, and for a while Marie Antoinette was a prisoner.”

“They were guillotined here?”

“No. They were taken to the Place de la Concorde.”

Only after moving into my apartment did I discover that I had my own connection to the Square du Temple. In 1524, during his triumphal tour of Europe, and after visiting King Francis at Fontainebleau, Antonio Pigafetta was an honored guest of his brethren, the Knights. He regaled them with stories of his great sea adventure. Whether or not he permitted them a look at the
Caravan Bestiary,
he certainly had it in his possession, just a few hundred yards from my building.

“Do you want a drink, or coffee?” I asked.

Lena turned around. “Coffee would be nice.”

She sat on the sofa and I went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. I nearly poured myself a whisky. Instead, I made the coffee very strong.

When I rejoined her, she looked me in the eye for the first time. “I’m sorry about this afternoon.”

I pulled a chair up to the sofa. “Forget it.”

She let out a long breath and again tried to smile. Then she covered her eyes. “Oh, Xeno.”

I leaned closer. “Lena, tell me what’s wrong.”

She shook her head. “Why did you fall so out of touch? Where were you?”

I hadn’t expected this, and it knocked me off-balance. Since we were children, there had been no one in my life like Lena. I had fallen in and out of love with other women, but I had loved her more than any of them. Even when we were separated by an ocean or a continent, and barely communicating, she had never seemed far from me. She was so much a part of my innermost self that, even if I wanted to dislodge her, I wouldn’t have known how. I wished I could tell her that just then, and break through all the barriers between us. But having been like a brother to her for so long, I had given up on the idea she could also be in love with me. To preserve what we did have, I had remained silent. The truth was, I feared I would push her away if she didn’t feel the same way.

When she reached out to me, I took her hand, and she pulled me down beside her. “I shouldn’t blame you,” she said. “I’m the one who’s been hiding out.”

“I’ve done my share. Maybe it’s time to stop hiding.”

She lowered her eyes and gently took her hand away, ostensibly to lift her coffee cup. “Bruno told you about my mother?”

“Yes.”

“And Sal?”

I nodded.

“I bet he didn’t tell you about the photo.”

“I don’t think so.”

“In the apartment on Staten Island, when she started to isolate, she wouldn’t even answer the phone. Maureen told us the only talking she did was to a photo of my father, taken on his last birthday. He’s standing under the big oak where we used to play. Remember?”

I remembered that the first time I saw Lena she was on a swing suspended from the oak’s lowest bough, holding a white cat her father had rescued from a fire.

“At night,” Lena went on, “my mother placed the photo on a pillow beside hers. She heard my father’s voice. He told her how to find him when, as she said,
I cross over to the other side.
And he told her to listen to Camilla, the eighty-year-old woman in the apartment below. Camilla was from the West Indies. A former midwife, she was an herbalist and faith healer. Apparently her favorite herb was marijuana, which she claimed speeded all healing, but only if one believed that Jesus still walked the earth, saving souls. She meant, literally. She gave Mom doctored snapshots that depicted a man who was the image of Jesus: bearded, long-haired, with a thousand-mile stare. He was wearing a white suit at the bazaar in Calcutta, crossing a public park in Berlin, exiting a nightclub in Tangier. Always in a crowd, but anonymous. Jesus in mufti,” she added drily. “Camilla prescribed reefer for my mother’s migraines. And it
worked.
It didn’t cure the migraines, but it took away her anxiety. Mom was getting high to the very end, and I believe she died happier because of it. Materially she was broke. She left me only one thing.”

She opened her handbag and fished out the salamander brooch she had shown me years before.

“It seems it’s easier for you to talk about your mother than yourself.”

“It is right now,” she said. She was examining the brooch. “I know your grandmother taught you that animals have souls. Do you still believe that?”

“I do.”

“Bruno doesn’t.”

“When it comes to Bruno and animals, what matters is that he has a soul.”

“That’s true.” She closed her eyes, and when she opened them again, her voice softened. “You once told me the book you’re searching for is all about the psyche.”

“What else could it be about? All our imaginings about animals, the mythmaking, our intense projections into their world. First, we set them up as our gods; then we made ourselves their gods and began treating them badly. Many of the animals I’ve studied were driven to extinction before entering the human imagination.”

She closed her eyes again, as if she was thinking—and maybe she was—but I soon realized our conversation was over. She tilted her head back and yawned, tucking her legs up under her. “I’m so tired. I should go home.”

“It’s late. Stay.”

I didn’t have to ask her again.

“Go into the bedroom,” I said. “I’ll sleep out here.”

“No, I like it right here,” she said, stretching out on the sofa.

I got the quilt off my bed and put it over her. “Good night,” I whispered.

But she was already asleep.

I stood in the kitchen and had that whisky. Then I switched off the lights and returned to my bedroom and lay on top of the sheets. Around four o’clock I woke up. A shaft of lamplight was streaming in from the living room.

Lena was at my desk, poring over a book. She had the quilt wrapped around her. She looked up as if she had been expecting me. “This is amazing,” she murmured.

Opened before her was a facsimile of the Mortford bestiary, compiled at the monastery of that name in Wales. The illustration she was pointing to was the avasphinx, a sphinx with a bird’s head and a leopard’s body, from the XI Dynasty in Egypt.

“You were always partial to sphinxes,” I said.

“Not like this.”

“All the sphinxes represented sun gods, but this one was also a phoenix. The pharaohs had its statue placed in their burial chambers, to deter the wiliest demons.”