When they implied that Bibi had spoken the words I am a Valiant girl in her coma, Toba sprang up from her kitchen chair as if sixty years had fallen from her flesh and bones. “She loved those books. She was so industrious about finding my unlisted phone number, amazingly determined for a girl of just fourteen. She called and apologized for calling, for snooping out the number. Come, now, you two, come along, let me show you. Well, Pogo has seen it, but you haven’t, Paxton. My study, where I wrote, where I write.”
As they followed her along the ground-floor hall and its shelves of precisely ordered books lovingly maintained dust-free, up the open stairs to the second floor, and to her office, Toba said, “You see, the Valiant series earned a comfortable living, but they were never best-sellers. I received some mail from readers, of course, but I was not besieged by little girls knocking on my door. I was flattered by the trouble Bibi had gone to. And charmed by our few minutes on the phone. So I said she could visit with her mother if she wished. A half hour. And bring five or six books to be signed. I’d never done a formal book signing. It seemed overreaching to me, too proud by half. Who was I, after all, but Toba Ringelbaum, who should have been dead a dozen times? I wasn’t Mr. Saul Bellow, though I might have wished to write so well! I found the girl enchanting, far too solemn for her age and yet delighting in every smallest thing, a knowledge sponge in search of something that I think always eluded her, still eludes her, whatever it might be.”
That her office was book-lined came as no surprise. The large ultramodern U-shaped desk wasn’t the heavy-footed European antique that Pax expected. The latest model computer with a screen that seemed the size of a billboard as well as printers and a scanner and a tech geek’s array of the latest electronic gadgets proved that she remained in the game to an extent that Pax had not realized, and he was embarrassed now to have thought her largely retired in spite of her claim to be still producing.
Pogo said, “This is like a starship control station, Toba-Wan Kenobi. I’ve always known the Force was with you. Are you a dedicated social networker?”
“Not much, dear. I have better ways to waste my time. Besides, I find social networking too antisocial for the most part. But I think it’s wise to keep an eye on it.”
At a section of shelves devoted to the display of her novels, she had arranged the American editions of the Valiant books in the order of publication. There were forty-six of them.
“She calls me her inspiration and her mentor,” Toba said, “and I might be vain enough to admit to the first, but not the second. How could I mentor a girl who, by the time she was seventeen and out of high school, was already a better writer than I am or ever could be?”
“Maybe you mentored her in other ways,” Pax said. “The values the girls learned at Valiant Academy. A lot of people these days might find those corny or certainly out of date. But Bibi says the code of the Valiant girls is a brilliant expansion and application of natural law.”
Toba was clearly pleased to hear this, but then she must have thought of Bibi abed in a hospital, lost in a coma, for she raised her mug and took a long draught of the spiked coffee. “If there was one thing she might have found in the Valiant girls that she didn’t already have or didn’t have in the fullest at fourteen, it was the wonderful concept of free will. She kept coming back to that in our conversations. That we are free to shape our own lives, that we can overcome. That there is a terrible danger in denying the existence of free will. The danger of deciding that we are meat machines, that all is meaningless and that we have no responsibility for what happens because of what we do.”
Pogo said, “Should I tell her about the tattoo?”
Pax nodded.
The concept of four injected words appearing without the aid of ink or tattooist did not startle Toba Ringelbaum or require her to stretch her belief system to any degree whatsoever. She had made no secret of the fact that during her time in Theresienstadt and then when she had been freed from Auschwitz within hours of her scheduled execution, she’d had several experiences beyond explanation, when for a moment logic and the laws of nature were suspended in such a way that she was spared when she should not have been. Some would label these events coincidence, which is a tool of fate, but others would call them miracles, which have no need of fate. She had never spoken of the specifics of those experiences, not even to her husband, Max, because they were sacred to her and because she understood that the infelicities of language would diminish them. The ineffable would not be ineffable if it could be described.
When Pogo finished, Pax opened the panther-and-gazelle notebook to the page on which lines of Bibi’s cursive script had appeared, and Toba listened without further need of spiked coffee as he explained how they had materialized and read them with her. Whether this was less or more astonishing than her indescribable experiences as a girl in the ghetto and in the death camp, he could not tell; however, he could see that they were of the same wondrous fabric, for she smiled and set her mug aside on the desk and said, “It’s not hopeless, then.”
“Why,” Pax wondered, “would she refer to you by your pen name—Halina Berg?”