At the heart of the matter was my child. My son aged two and a half who barely knew me, who kept forgetting my name, to whom I could not send gifts, with whom I could not play in the Gardens or beyond them, my son the heir to another man’s fortune, his mother’s passport to the future. My son in whose little face I so clearly saw my own. I was surprised that no one else seemed to notice the strong likeness, that in fact people said he looked just like his father who was not his father, a victory of the ostensible over the actual. People see what they are supposed to see.
Vespasian, what kind of a name was Vespasian, anyway. It irritated me more and more. “Little Vespa,” indeed. A little Vespa was what Audrey Hepburn drove so recklessly around the Eternal City on her Roman Holiday, with Gregory Peck panicky on the pillion. My son deserved a better handle than those movie stars’ handlebars. He deserved at the very least the name of one of the grand masters of the cinema, Luis or Kenji or Akira or Sergei, Ingmar or Andrzej or Luchino or Michelangelo, Fran?ois or Jean-Luc or Jean or Jacques. Or Orson or Stanley or Billy or even, prosaically, Clint. I had begun to dream only-half-unseriously of a kidnapping, or running away with my Federico or Alfred and escaping into the world of cinema itself, plunging into the movies in the opposite direction to Jeff Daniels in the Woody Allen movie, breaking the fourth wall to dive into the movies rather than out of them into the world. Who needed the world when you could run across the desert behind Peter O’Toole’s camel or, with Kubrick’s astronaut Keir Dullea, murder the mad computer HAL 9000 while it sang “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do”? What was the point of reality if you could skip with a lion and a scarecrow down the Yellow Brick Road, or descend a grand staircase beside Gloria Swanson, ready for Mr. DeMille to shoot your close-up? Yes, my son and I, hand in hand, would marvel at the gigantic buttocks and breasts of the whores in Fellini’s Roma and sit in despair on a Roman sidewalk mourning a stolen bicycle and jump into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and fly back to the future and be free.
But it couldn’t happen. We were all trapped in Vasilisa’s charade, the child most of all, the child was her winning move. For a moment I wondered exactly how ruthless Vasilisa might be; had she somehow engineered the deaths of two of the three Golden boys at least, and might she also have put a hit out on the third if he hadn’t taken his own life? But I had seen too many movies, and was succumbing to the same melodrama as lovelorn, angry Vito Tagliabue. I shook my head to clear it. No, she was probably not a murderer or a commissioner of murders. She was just—“just!”—a conniving and manipulative creature who was close to winning her war.
The new closeness that grew up between Nero and Riya after the three deaths put a Siberian scowl on the second Mrs. Golden’s beautiful (if slightly frozen) face, but came as no surprise to me. The three-times-unfathered father had nobody with whom to mourn Apu or Petya but her grief about D’s death was equal to his own. There was no noun in any language they knew that named the parent whose child had died, no equivalent of widower or orphan, and no verb to describe the loss. Bereavement wasn’t exact but it would have to do. They sat together in Nero’s study in the silence of their loss, their silence like a conversation in which everything that needed to be said was said, like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett silently suffused by sadness both for the world and for themselves. He was frail, complaining sometimes of dizziness, at others of nausea, and he would doze off and wake up again several times in an evening. There were failures of memory. Sometimes he didn’t remember she was there. But at other times he was once again his old sharp self. His decline wasn’t a straight-line graph. There were ups and downs, though the trend was inescapably downward.
One night she took him uptown to the Park Avenue Armory where in a semicircle of eleven tall concrete towers professional mourners from around the world performed the myriad sounds of that most silent of silences, death. A blind accordionist from Ecuador played yaravíes in one tower, and three Cambodian mourners who had escaped the efforts of the Khmer Rouge to eradicate their kind performed the ceremony called kantomming, playing a flute and large and small gongs. The performances were not long, maybe fifteen or twenty minutes, but their resonances echoed within Riya and Nero long after they left the space. Nero said only, “The bird was useful.” Alone in one of the towers a giant and nonspecific bird, something like a rooster, was seated on a concrete shelf, a mourner from Burkina Faso completely hidden inside his bird suit with a bird head sitting on his own, and bells on his ankles that jingled softly when he moved his feet. The bird mourner made no sound apart from that occasional faint jingle, and sat very still except for the occasional very slight shudder, and his grave and kindly presence was powerful enough to heal just a little of Riya’s and Nero’s pain. “Do you want to go again,” Riya asked Nero when they were out on the sidewalk again. “No,” he said. “Enough is enough.”
One night after many nights of wordlessness Nero did speak. The study was in darkness. They needed no light.
“You shouldn’t quit your job, daughter,” he said. He had started calling her that.
The statement, made without any preamble or shadow of a doubt, caught her off guard.
“You know what, thank you, but this is stuff you don’t understand,” she said, too harshly. “This is my stuff, or it was for a long time.”
“You are right,” he said. “This question of gender is beyond my comprehension. Man, woman, okay. Homosexual, all right, I know it exists. This other world, men with surgically constructed organs, women without women’s parts, you lost me. You’re right. I’m a dinosaur, and my mind is not one hundred percent. But you? You know this inside out. You are right. This is your stuff.”
She didn’t reply. They had grown comfortable in their silences; there was no need to answer him.
“It’s about him, I know,” he said. “You blame yourself and so you abandon your field.”
“My field,” she said. “It should be a soft safe place for understanding. Instead it’s a war zone. I choose peace.”
“You’re not at peace,” he said. “So much of this identity subject you have no problem with. Black, Latino, women, this is all fine. It’s this in-between sex area that you call the war zone. If you want peace there, maybe be the peacemaker. Don’t run away from the fight.”
He heard a question in her silence. “Why, you think I can’t inform myself a little?” he said. “You think because my brain is slowly weakening, shrinking like a cheap shirt, that it’s all gone? Not yet dead, young woman. Not dead yet.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Take the leave of absence. Think things through. Don’t quit.”
“Okay,” she said.
“Me,” he said, “I shifted my identity too.”
Later, after Riya has left, the old man is alone in the darkened room. The landline telephone rings. He decides whether or not to answer, reaches out, pulls his hand back, reaches out again, answers.
Yes.
Golden sahib.
Who is this.
I do not think so you will remember my name. I was a small fry in a very big frying pan.
What is your name.
Mastan. Formerly Inspector, Mumbai CID, subsequently Himachal Pradesh. Afterwards, private sector. Presently retired.
Pause.