Ten days later, the man in the brown jacket was waiting at her aunt’s door when they arrived home from school. The aunt ushered him in, offered him a cup of coffee. Elise went up to her room to play.
While at her aunt’s house, she had learned to play at wild ponies. The aunt had two such ponies, both made of hard plastic but molded in such away that you could see the muscles on their flanks, the twists and curves of their manes. They had belonged to the aunt when she was a girl, and sometimes the aunt would play at them with her. She and the aunt liked to gallop them across the carpet, which was green and like grass, and the ponies would talk and sometimes go places together. Elise thought it was a game she was too young to be playing, but since the aunt played it, she was willing to play too.
The wild ponies had just galloped off across the sward, as her aunt called it, and were standing, blowing and nickering, on the edge of a stream, trying to decide whether to swim across it or stay put, when the door opened and her aunt came in.
“Honey,” the aunt said. “I don’t know if you’ll think it’s good news or bad. They found your mother.”
She just kept playing with the ponies.
Her aunt crawled beside her and ran her hand up and down Elise’s back.
“The man downstairs,” she said, “he wants to speak to you.”
Elise shook her head.
“Now, darling,” said the aunt, “don’t be like that. He’s not going to hurt you.”
Elise realized that one of the ponies was restless, swaying and nickering, and didn’t understand why, and then realized that she was holding it too tightly. She let her hand loosen up and the pony stopped. Then she felt someone else in the room and looked up and saw the man in the brown jacket.
“Elise?” he said. “Can I talk to you?”
Elise shook her head.
“She’s not usually like this,” said the aunt. “Not usually so stubborn.”
“No?” said the man. “Elise,” he said, “your mother is in custody. You’re safe now.”
Safe? thought Elise. Safe from what?
“I need,” said the man, leaning down and toward her, “I need you to tell me everything that you saw.”
Elise didn’t answer.
“Elise,” said the man, his voice stern. “This is important.”
“I want to see her,” said Elise.
“Now, Elise,” said her aunt. “Don’t you think—”
“I want to see my mother,” she said.
“All right,” said the man. “I can foresee that as an eventuality. But first, a few questions.”
“No,” said Elise. “Now.”
But by the time they were on the way to the jail, she felt drained, as if she had worked herself up by so thoroughly insisting on seeing her mother. The urgency to see her mother had left her. For once, they had listened and understood, but now that they had understood, she didn’t know if it was what she wanted anymore.
They got out of the car and went in through a door with an alarm bell on top of it, the alarm going off as they pushed through. They went down a white hall and into a room with a mirror the whole length of one wall. She sat down at a table and the man in the brown jacket sat next to her. The aunt had to wait outside.
Elise waited patiently, her hands in her lap, her head slightly bowed. How long had it been since she had seen her mother? She didn’t know. Would she recognize her mother? Yes, of course. But would her mother recognize her?
After a while the door opened and her mother was led in. She was wearing orange and had her hands in front of her in handcuffs. She was being punished, Elise realized. She smiled nervously at her daughter.
“Darling,” she said, “please, tell them I had nothing to do with it.”
There was something wrong, Elise suddenly realized, something truly wrong. It was as if her mother had been coached on what to say, as if she had practiced saying it. She couldn’t quite put her finger on it, but she was sure it was a trap.
And with that, Elise entered into what she felt at the time, and even for some years after, was the only truly lucid period of her life. Correction, she heard a part of her mind state. Do nothing, she thought. Say nothing. Watching her mother across the table, she closed her mouth and kept it closed. She steeled herself, at once terrified and elated over where it all was likely to lead.
Alfons Kuylers
On the night of 12 October, I was compelled for reasons I still find quite difficult to explain to kill one Alfons Kuylers, esteemed dealer in imported goods of a specialty nature, my mentor, my master in the art of philosophical paradox, my tutor in all things theological. I gained nothing from this crime save for a ring he had offered me many times before, and a long letter he had apparently intended to give me, in which he urged me to leave the country immediately. This was the final piece of advice I would have from him, and also one of the few which, perhaps impulsively, perhaps sentimentally, I ever followed.
It was well past midnight by the time I left Kuylers’s apartment. The night was gusty and dismal; with the curfew still in effect, I had to take great care in journeying through the streets. I had burnt Kuylers’ letter after reading it, believing as I did that it would be better, if I were questioned, not to have it on my person. Other than his ring, I carried nothing of real value — a few loose coins, the clothing I wore, an overcoat with a crumpled handkerchief in the pocket, and the lacquered walking stick I had used first to knock Alfons Kuylers off his feet and then deliver the fatal blow. This object, stained with blood and brains, was rapidly washed clean in the rain.
By way of alleys and backstreets I progressed toward the waterfront. There was, traveling always with me, sometimes closer and sometimes farther, the memory, surprisingly vivid, of Kuylers’s face changing as he realized what was going to happen to him. Until I saw it in his face, I did not know that I would kill him, but from that moment forward it felt as if the matter were entirely out of my hands. My steps were at first confident and unhurried, but as this memory continued to plague me, the sounds of my own footsteps seemed to my own ears increasingly erratic. Soon I heard at a little distance the sound of a scuffle, followed quickly by a shot and an anguished cry, after which my composure abandoned me altogether, so that by the time I arrived at the docks I was harried and utterly out of breath.
Not utterly out of breath, I thought at the docks, smoothing back my hair, trying again to calm myself. For I had seen earlier that evening a man who was, being dead, utterly out of breath: one Alfons Kuylers. No, the problem, I realized, was — as Alfons Kuylers had said in so many of our philosophical sessions together—the opposite and the inverse, not that I was too out of breath, but that I was, as it were, too alive, living too many lives at once, as if I were breathing for many men. In retrospect, this realization seems far from cogent, simply another layer of ontological mystification, but at the time it seemed akin to revelation.
It was in such a state, slightly feverish perhaps from the rain or from the fatal events that had transpired earlier, that I began my search. At this hour most vessels were inaccessible, gangplanks raised, ramps blocked off. I moved from ship to ship, trying to find one that would grant me a berth. I hailed several from the docks without receiving a reply. The one reply I did finally have suggested that surely nothing was to be done in the dead of night, particularly considering the unrest in the city: I should return in the morning.
But morning, I feared, would be too late for me. I persisted, moving slowly from ship to ship, crying out, trying my luck with vessels large and small, albeit with little hope. It would be better, I counseled myself, to turn yourself in, for your crime was pointless and worthy only of regret. And yet I kept on, calling out, asking for passage, proclaiming that, though a scholar rather than a sailor, I was eager and willing to learn.