Marianne, the Madame, and the Momentary Gods (5 page)

‘Very big. And one that looked like a wolf. And a red one. And a smaller yellow one. And one that was kind of bluish.’

‘Bluish?’ Papa asked, unbelieving.

The animal control officer did not disbelieve. ‘Well, yes sir, it could be. A blue tick hound, maybe. They’re really sort of dark gray with white mixed in. It does look bluish, particularly in the sun.’

‘Does her description mean anything to you?’

‘I’m afraid not. Dogs will pack, of course. It’s as natural to them as—well, as going to football games is to us. Usually when we hear about a pack, it’s made up of dogs from adjacent properties. They get acquainted along their borders, so to speak, and then they run together when they get the chance. It doesn’t take much to make a friendly pack into a hunting pack, either. That’s natural to dogs, too, but I’ve never heard of a pack attacking a mounted man.’ He fell silent, musing for a time before he went on. ’I know of one big black dog, but he’s old as the hills and almost toothless. As for the rest of them, well, it’s an odd assortment, you’ll admit. You sure about the colors and sizes, Marianne?’

‘Yes sir.’ She was. She could even have told the officer where to find the dogs, but he hadn’t asked her that. When she thought it over, she realized he could not have found them there, even if she had told him.

‘How about breeds. Do you know anything about different breeds of dog?’

‘The red one was like the dog in Papa’s office.’

They went into the office to look at the pair of Foo Dogs on Papa’s desk: the male, on the right, with his foot upon the glove; the female, on the left, with her foot upon her pup.

‘What are they, sir? Some kind of idol?’

‘Temple guardians,’ Papa had replied. ‘If they look like any living breed at all, I’d say it would be the chow. That would go with the red coloring Marianne mentioned. Chows have black mouths and tongues, too.’

‘His mouth was black,’ said Marianne, verifying the identification. This, too, was perfectly true.

Papa raged and the animal control man sympathized, but they didn’t find the pack of dogs.

‘What now?’ she asked her internal voice, still dreaming. None of it was real. Not any of it.

‘Now?’ The voice was remote, as though it reached her from some incredible distance. ‘Marianne; nothing now. You’ve saved them. You’ve saved yourself. Now you must get on with your life and they must go on with theirs.’

‘That’s
all
!’ She was incredulous.

‘That’s all.’ The sadness in that voice! Marianne was too young to recognize the components of that emotion—aching love and a piercingly sweet renunciation—but she could not miss the sadness. ‘Oh,’ the voice went on, with tears in it, ’except one thing. When you are about twenty-one or -two, maybe a little older than that, you may meet a man. His name is Makr Avehl. He comes from Alphenlicht, like I—like we do. He may know all about this. About Harvey, everything. He’s—he’s a very – well, he’s a very good friend of ours.’

‘Do you—do you love him?’ In the vision, it seemed appropriate that she should love him.

‘He saved my life. He loves me,’ the voice said sadly. ‘I do love him. I don’t know if you will or not.’ It went away then. Purposefully and absolutely, as though some tenuous line that had tied it to this Marianne had been deliberately severed and the connection between them had been broken. Young Marianne knew that grown-up
Marianne
was gone. Not merely elsewhere, but gone. There were no longer two, but only one. If the other
Marianne
had been correct about Madame and about Harvey, no one knew it now except young Marianne herself. And perhaps the man. Makr Avehl. If he were real and not merely part of the dream.

‘Mack Ravel,’ she said to herself, already forgetting the name. ‘From Alphenlicht.’

Time went on. The motionless body that was Harvey came home from the hospital with two attendants and a wheeled litter. His attendants said he could see well enough. He could even signal yes and no by blinking his eyes, though he seemed to do so only in response to questions concerning food or temperature. Would he like more ice cream? Was it too warm? The eyes would blink – once for yes, twice for no. If one asked anything unrelated to food or temperature, ’Would you like to go out on the lawn, Harvey?’ there was no response at all.

Sometimes she would come into a room and find him parked there, just lying, looking at her. Sometimes she saw something in his silent stare that could not really be there, something smoldering, like flame beneath a pile of ashes. She told herself it was only because she needed to see something rather than this vacancy. In reality, everyone said there was nothing there. The doctors agreed. The body lived, but whatever had been Harvey within it did not.

Seeing him thus helpless, unmanned, dehumanized, converted into something that was kept alive only out of a conventional sense of the appropriate, made her former belief in the immediacy of danger seem remote and unlikely. The precarious world of her dream-threat faded; her conviction went with it. She did not really believe in it. Belief in the momentary gods departed. She did not think they had really existed, either. By the time she was fourteen, fifteen, she knew that none of it had been real. The accident had been only an accident. There had been dogs. Only dogs. The rest was woven out of fairy tales and too much imagination and an overbred sense of guilt. Her childhood had not really been as she remembered it, all known ahead of time. There had not really been a grown-up
Marianne
in her head. All those double visions of things had not actually happened. They had resulted from some kind of juvenile nervous disorder, now outgrown. She did not tell herself it would never happen again. She merely thought of it as an aberration, one she could handle.

All her memories shifted, changed, underwent a softening as she told herself what she had thought was real had been only a childish imagination.

Until at last there was nothing left at all. Except, from time to time, a feeling of formless guilt. Try though she might to tell herself that it had only been an accident, something inside accused her of being responsible for Harvey’s condition. His silent body became ubiquitous, a constant accusation. He seemed to inhabit every room of the house simultaneously. He and the litter were inseparable, half living, half mechanical, not a life but an accusatory device. She twisted beneath the pressure of guilt, feeling it a burden that she longed to shift away from herself.

Who had done it really?

That other
Marianne
who was only a fiction? Fictions cannot be responsible for anything.

Was there a real person involved in all this? She would wait and see. If there was, that person was surely responsible for whatever had happened. If anything had happened.

‘It wasn’t my fault,’ some childish part of her continued to insist. ‘I didn’t do anything. If anybody did anything at all, they did it.’

Time went. School went. Out of her love for her horse and her interest in animals of all kinds, out of her devotion to the vast acres that Papa Zahmani had said one day would be hers, she had studied agriculture and livestock and business management, knowing she would have to prove herself to Papa before he would let her, a woman, manage the estate with its huge stables of thoroughbreds and its herds of pure-bred cattle. Papa would never have considered her if Harvey had been well and able, but Harvey wasn’t. Guilt bit at her again, but she shrugged it off and went on with her studies.

The University went. There was a love affair, sweet and intense and sudden as a summer shower, over as soon, leaving Marianne wondering what she had seen in a particular egotistic, not very interesting, and totally predictable young man. With encouragement from Mama, she decided to forget him by visiting the land of her forebears. She spent several happy weeks among the small villages of Alphenlicht, picking up a little of its language and learning of its customs, no stranger to her than others she had seen in places far closer. When she read of the Prime Minister of the country, Makr Avehl, it was with a sense that she might have read or heard the name before, but it made no particular impression. The papers said he was on his way to the United Nations in New York. There was another dispute between Alphenlicht and neighboring Lubovosk. Madame Delubovoska had asserted a right for Lubovosk to govern the lands of Alphenlicht. The Prime Minister ridiculed these specious claims. The matter would be heard before the General Assembly. Reading of this, Marianne experienced a tremor of recollection, as though, after a long detour, she had come once again upon an old, well-traveled road. The sensation lasted only for a moment. Real memories did not form; no voice spoke.

She went home again. It was time to get on with her life, Time to take a job. Time to become herself.

She waited, deciding among several job offers, spending a lot of time riding to use up recurrent spasms of nervous energy. She felt she should be doing something, fighting some battle, accomplishing some task she could not define even for herself. Something. Something quite remarkable.

Until the afternoon she rode up to the house and found Papa and Mama on the terrace, entertaining a tall, spectacularly handsome man. She had seen his picture often in Alphenlicht. She recognized him with disbelief, wondering what had brought him here, accepting the introduction to him as she would to any total stranger.

‘And you are Marianne,’ said Makr Avehl.

She, wondering what he was doing here, gave him her usual glowing smile, which he misinterpreted at once.

During dinner they exchanged only pleasantries, slightly formally as was consistent with their just having met. Great-aunt Dagma gave them both a long, level look through her glasses but said nothing. Marianne felt herself flush under that look and resented it. When dinner was done, he asked her to walk with him in the garden.

‘Marianne,’ he said to her as soon as they were out of sight of the terrace, drawing her close to him. ‘Oh, by all that’s holy, my Marianne.’

‘What in hell!’ she exclaimed, breaking away from him and turning as though to flee, stopping only at his shout of half pain, half dismay. She was angrier than she could have thought possible. ‘I don’t know you,’ she grated at him. ’What do you think you’re doing?’

He stood there, trembling, unable to speak, staring at her, searching her face for the woman he remembered. In his own memory, he had left
Marianne
only days before—or rather, had been left by her – in a strange, sorcerous world she had helped to create. She had left him there, but he had found her again—except that he seemed to have found a different woman.

The difference was there, in her face. This was not the gallant
Marianne
who played life’s deck even when it was stacked against her. This woman was no less lovely but far less tried. There was little or no pain in this one’s face. Perhaps this one had courage also, but it might well be of a different kind. Except for a shadow of guilt, this one had clear, untroubled eyes. They might have been sisters. Even twins. But not the same.

‘Accept my apology,’ he said from an agonized throat. ‘I truly thought – never mind what I thought. Forgive me. Pretend it didn’t happen.’ He turned away, then back to her as though he could not leave her and she responded to the pain in his face as she had not to his importunity. ‘Walk with me,’ he said at last in a voice aching with loss, needing to move before he froze into place, turned into ageless ice by this grief he felt.

She wanted to refuse him but could not do so without being ungracious. He had obviously made a mistake. Perhaps he had known someone else by her name, someone with the family resemblance. He, himself, might have been her father’s son or younger brother. She had no wish to be rude, though she could not help being angry. The latter was understandable, but the former was beneath her. So Cloud-haired mama often said. So she thought. He was not being demanding. A little resentfully but graciously enough she turned to walk beside him on the path while he examined her face as though it had been a holy icon of his religion.

‘You really don’t remember?’ he asked in a voice pathetically pleading for such a big and powerful man. ‘You really don’t?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about, Your Excellency.’

‘There was—there was another
Marianne
. Your twin. You, in another world. She—I… I loved her very much.’

She softened at his tone. It would have been impossible not to. One would not kick the victim of an accident, someone lying broken on the road. So, she could not kick at him emotionally when he was so obviously broken.

‘It’s odd you should speak of another
Marianne
,’ she murmured. ‘When I was a child, I sometimes thought there was another
Marianne
. Although I know now it was only hallucination, it seemed then I had a grown-up twin, in my head, somewhere. An older self. At one time I bothered myself a lot trying to figure out whether she was real.’

‘What if I told you she was?’

Wary, she responded, ‘I don’t care. It wouldn’t have anything to do with me. I seem to remember that from the time I was about five until about twelve, there was a voice inside me, a kind of prompter. It may have been imaginary. At the time, it seemed to tell me things. Things that were going to happen.’ A sudden and unexpected memory assailed her. ‘It told me your name.’

‘Yes,’ he prompted.

‘It’s hard to… think of that time.’

‘The voice told you about your half brother, and Madame Delubovoska?’