“Is it? Always walking a tightrope between crack smokers with knives and cocaine pushers with guns?”
Iris pursed her lips. “Day got a goot pension if dey get kilt. Und da way I look at it is dis. Like da Arab says”—here she raised her pointer finger into the air—“‘It is written by da prophet ven you shall die. From da day to da hour, yea to da very moment.’ All dat udder stuff about chance is poppycock.”
“Really? I don’t see you with any framed pictures of dead husbands.”
Iris sipped her tea.
“Oh, God, I’m sorry! I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t know what came over me. It’s just that I feel suddenly so at ease talking to you … as though I’ve known you for a long time. I never would dare to say something like that to anyone unless I felt close to them. I mean … you must forgive me. My mouth goes off before the thought even reaches my brain.”
“Dat’s all right, dat’s all right,” Iris waved away her apology. “I like you because you do say vot’s on your mind … not because you vatch your vords. No, that doesn’t bother me. But, as you must know, sometimes we carry da strongest memories around with us in our hearts, not in picture frames.”
Claire nodded sadly, remembering Michael. All the loneliness she’d gained with his death could never outweigh the joy of having had him once. Not for a moment.
“I used to have pictures,” Iris mused aloud. “But den came such upheaval in Europe. I took pictures myself, once, with a camera. Ach. I was so proud of dose pictures. I even framed dem myself. You can’t take dat sort of important ting vith you ven you’re getting out of da country.”
Now, isn’t that odd, thought Claire. Weren’t there some sort of pictures … pictures without frames … why, of course. It had been with Michael, a million years ago. They had to have been children. They’d gotten hold of some pictures, dirty pictures. One of those pictures had made such an impression on her that she couldn’t imagine how she had blocked it out. It was a magazine picture, one of those cheap, detective sort of sexy things. There was a man. He was wearing a raincoat and holding a gun. No, then he wasn’t a detective, he was just holding out that gun and pointing it at a woman, she was sitting on the bed in her fancy underwear and there was a caption, cut out with letters from comic books and taped into sentences and it said, wait a minute, it said: “Take off your stockings and pull down your panties.”
Iris cleared her throat. “Dere is,” she said, “a lot to be said for loss itself. It makes you appreciate vot you have. Every bit of it.”
The two women looked at each other with mute misunderstanding. Claire remembered her manners. She sat up briskly. “All those pictures you don’t have anymore, were they of someone special?”
“Special? At dat time, ja. Dey vere special den. Only now dey are nothing but memories. Now my pictures are the sounds of crowded trams going up the Prinzregentenplatz … full of people long, long dead.”
Claire shivered. The rain outside was loud and the dust on the window sills had turned to muddy grime. She realized that with the darkness of her loneliness exposed to light, Iris’s mystery had disappeared and now she had Claire on her side. They could arrest Iris but no one would ever convince her that she had killed those children. She found herself staring at a pack of worn out tarot cards on the table. The police weren’t going to like the looks of those. It wouldn’t hurt to get rid of them. The cat jumped onto Iris’s lap and rubbed his head on her breast.
“That’s an interesting name for a cat. Lü.”
“Dat’s Chinese. It means the Wanderer.”
“You know, Iris, if I were you, I’d put those tarot cards away.”
“Pschew. I don’t use dem anymore.”
“You don’t believe in them anymore?”
“Oh, dey work. Don’t think even for a little moment dat you can’t ask da cards. Dat dey von’t tell you exactly vot it is you vant to know. Dat’s sure. I don’t use dem now anymore because I happen to believe in prayer better. The direct approach. Me? I go right to da top. God himself. I don’t bother with dose little saints, either. Und I don’t bother with da cards because even dough dey’ll tell you vot it is you vant to know, dere’s no good reason for you to know it. Not in my book. Anything gonna happen, gonna happen. Vat for should’ve know da future? Take da fun out of it.”
“Yes, but what about preventive foresight?”
“Dat’s vot God gave us intuition for. You rely too much on all these ersatz methods: astrology, palmistry, tarot … you lose your telepathic gift. Your own individual nose, as it vere.”
“Yeah, I can see that.”
“Und anyhow,” Iris slapped the air, “I get sick and tired of reading everybody’s cards.”