“It would take too long to explain this, Bill. But it is Emira Zandi who is a creation. I am who I have told you.”
“I only wish. Because I actually liked Esma a good deal. She wasn’t the right gal for me for the long run, but she’s someone I enjoyed and admired. In some ways she was a dream come true.” A wet one, my inner wise guy would have added, but that was not to diminish the depth or the importance of the longing. “But there is no barrister at Bank Street, or in all of the UK for that matter, named Esma Czarni.”
“I was called to the bar in my maiden name.”
“You told me you were never married. Now I find you and Jahanbani have been involved in a protracted divorce here in New York.”
“I knew you were far too respectable to become involved with a married woman, Bill, even though my marriage has been functionally dead for a decade.”
She had reconnected with her skills as a liar, leveling her chin and steadying her eyes for the last declarations about Esma. We could leapfrog our way through her fabrications forever, with me exposing one and her answering by making up another, switching identities as need be. She was exorbitantly unhinged. And equally gifted. There was no point.
“You lured me to your bed, Emira, so I would believe all this bullshit. Which I did. It was very exciting.”
She responded sternly.
“You wanted to be ‘lured,’ Bill, as you put it.”
“True that. I did.”
“But I was never going to be any more to you, Bill, than a playmate with big tits. You were never going to love me.”
The boiling nature of that accusation struck me at first as another of the gambits a savvy fraud employed to put the other party on the defensive. She’d tried this before, casting me as the wrongdoer and herself as the victim. I was ready to remind her that it was she who’d warned me against falling in love.
But again, none of this was about what was rational. It went without saying that someone who lived a made-up reality did so to experience what she wouldn’t otherwise. Given that, she had warned me against what in some ways she must have most wanted. Who, after all, ever feels she or he has had enough love?
“I have always suspected you were in love with someone else,” Esma said. “I can see that I am right—the signs are all over you, the way you stand apart from me, so defiantly. That’s why you’re here in the US, isn’t it? It’s been coming for months. You have gone back to your ex-wife, haven’t you, Bill?”
I gripped my forehead instinctively.
“I would have hoped, Esma, Emira, whoever you are—” I stopped. “I would have hoped that whatever else, you would have actually learned something about me. Apparently not.”
“You are covering up. I know what I know, Bill. You are now sure you are in love, and not with me. Go ahead, Bill. Go back to your wife and your silly little life in Kindle County.”
I stood up. “Are you going to tell me why you did this? Why you engaged in this lengthy charade?”
“The Roma people are entitled to justice, Bill. Whatever you think of me, or wish to believe, the Roma have never had justice. I wanted to bring them some. And in my zeal, I was taken in by Ferko, just like you and Goos.”
That, I supposed, was the best I was going to get from her, as much as I would hear from beneath the mask.
“Good-bye, Esma,” I said.
I started down the corridor past her, and she laid her hand on my arm as I brushed past. She spoke in a low voice, her eyes again radiating some of their familiar power.
“I never lied to you in bed, Bill,” she said.
Outside, it had become an overcast day of jungle humidity. I looked for a place to gather myself. After making a wrong turn, I ended up on an avenue behind the jail, strung with the neon signs for bail bondsmen, where I found a hole-in-the-wall bodega. There were a couple of chipped linoleum tables beneath a clanging window air conditioner, and I sat at one, downing half of a soda from a waxed cup. The floor here hadn’t been mopped since the turn of the millennium, and the place had the faint stink of grime and bad plumbing. Several of the hustlers going to or coming from court dates filtered in, speaking too loudly to the Pakistani guy behind the cash register as they purchased lottery tickets or cigarettes. That man, presumably the owner, made no effort to be friendly. One of his hands never came above the scratched Plexiglas counter beside him, a display case of candy and gum bearing a makeshift padlock. I was relatively sure he was holding a weapon of some kind, probably a bat or a crowbar, out of sight.
Pondering now, a few blocks and a few minutes away from Esma, I found myself less enraged than I expected. My parents, especially my father, were never far off whenever I started condemning her for her make-believe life. In truth, many of us did lesser versions of what she had done, settling into new selves at times. Only six months ago, I’d thrown over the life I’d spent a quarter of a century making in Kindle County, because I felt something more authentic calling to me from The Hague.
The one thing that had continued to baffle me was why she wanted to be Roma. But going through my haphazard research about her again before departing for this trip, I’d noticed that probably the most famous person of Rom heritage in the academic world, Professor Bavel Wilson, an outspoken advocate for Roma civil rights, had been for decades a fellow at Caius College at Cambridge, where Esma passed her university years. He was a magnetic and inspirational figure in his YouTube videos, and it was not hard to imagine his effect on the younger Emira. But without the psychological excursions of a biographer, I would never fully comprehend her inner motivations. Did she feel deeply injured or abused for some reason? Probably. Why else would she want to present herself as a member of what Roger had appropriately called the most screwed-over group of white people on earth?
But that remained speculation. The one thing I felt surer of, as I instinctively kept an eye on the lurking types who slid in and out of the bodega, was that Esma’s seductive power was rooted in her dual personas. Whoever she was being, some fragment of her consciousness had to be reserved for the other personality, so she could escape to it when need be. Except in the bed. The line of hers that would always excite me most in memory was when she urged me to experience that moment ‘when there is nothing of you but pleasure.’ For her, the bedroom was a place of purification, where, at peak moments, she was one soul, without reservations or ambiguity. Thus it was probably true that from her perspective she had never lied to me there.
And for that reason she’d been able to recognize a kindred yearning in me. Digging through the layers of her lies and what they meant about the case, about her, and about me, I hit that locked chest that explorers in stories inevitably found when they hunted buried treasure. Within it was my own dirty little secret. No matter how baffling her motives, I would always have to acknowledge this: I had gotten exactly what I wanted from her anyway.
34.
OTR—July 9–10