Take her then, she said.
Outside the realm of India’s imagination, however, Max Ophuls went on refusing to criticize his former wife, perhaps because of his feelings of guilt about his old betrayal. Once or twice, in tones of sorrow, he spoke about the power of life’s violent blows and slow agonies to divert a good person from his or her natural path, just as dynamite or erosion can-dramatically or gradually-change the course of a river, and in these speeches he might have been talking about Margaret, but he might also have been describing himself. And his secretiveness was a trait he shared with his ex-wife, they were both citizens of the underworld, they both had things to hide. But at least he understood about underworlds and followed India all the way down into her own private inferno and stayed by her side for months on end, until the dark god released her and let her follow him up into the light, and the Swiss doctors pronounced her well enough to reenter the overworld of ordinary life and he brought her down from the mountain in the back of a new Bentley driven by a new liveried chauffeur, cradling her in his arms as if she were the Ten Commandments, and restored her, if not to ordinary life, then to Los Angeles, at least.
The house on Mulholland Drive was sprawling, with staff quarters, stables, a tennis court, a guest cottage and a pool, and built in the Spanish Mission style, white walled, with barrel-tiled roofs and a bell tower that reminded her of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and gave the place an inappropriately ecclesiastical air. She thought of Kim Novak falling from the tower of the San Juan Bautista Mission at the end of the movie and shuddered and refused her father’s offer to take her up to the top of the tower to show her the carillon. For a while, when she first arrived in L.A., she stayed indoors, curled up in chairs and corners, grateful to be alive, but taking her time to make sure she was safe. She preferred to keep her feet on the ground and a roof over her head. The stone floors felt cool beneath her unshod feet and the stained glass in the living-room windows poured colors over her every day. Kim Novak had played an impostor, a woman called Judy, hired to impersonate a woman named Madeleine Elster whose husband had murdered her. There were days when India felt like an impostor too, when she felt as if she’d been hired by Max to impersonate a daughter who had died.
Max’s study was a somber anomaly in this house of color and light: wood paneled, with heavy European couches and mahogany tables, its shelves lined with books printed long ago by Art & Aventure, a Belle Époque movie set of a room designed to echo another long-lost room, his father’s library in Strasbourg: more a memory than a place. He did not allow himself the open sentimentality of hanging his parents’ pictures on the wall. The room itself was their portrait. He spent much of his day in this room, reading and remembering, and allowed his daughter the run of the rest of the big, empty old place. One day, rummaging through the closets in the guesthouse, she found a hatbox containing a short blond wig, a castoff of one of her father’s long-forgotten lovers, and she backed away from it, terrified, as if it were a death sentence. There was something of James Stewart’s slow grace in Max and when the shadows fell across his face in a certain way he scared her. He had to remind her that Jimmy Stewart hadn’t been the murderer in Vertigo, he was the good guy. She had been a little crazy in those days too, clean but skittish, but he had waited her out. Which is not to say he was kindly. Kind, yes, in his way, good in a crisis, expecting no thanks for doing what he saw as his duty, but not kindly. When she brought up Kim Novak and the blond wig in the closet he did not restrain his tongue. “Be so good,” he said at the conclusion of an eloquent tirade, “as to cease to cast yourself in fictions. Pinch yourself, or slap yourself across the face if that’s what it takes, but understand, please, that you are nonfictional, and this is real life.”
Then for a time she was sane and happy in the house on Mulholland Drive and surprised herself by becoming a proficient athlete and a brilliant student with a strong interest in history and biography and, more particularly, in fact-based films. After leaving high school she traveled alone to London to study the work of the British documentary film movement of the thirties and forties and-though she mentioned this to nobody-to do a little documentary research of her own. During these months she lived in a poorly lit but spacious and high-ceilinged room in furnished student digs near Coram’s Fields and made no attempt to contact the Grey Rat. She never traveled south to Lower Belgrave Street but she did make her way up the Northern Line to Colindale, where she unearthed the frustratingly patchy newspaper records of the events surrounding her birth. She returned to Los Angeles and kept the trip to the newspaper library to herself but volubly informed her father of her newfound reverence for the British documentarists John Grierson and Jill Craigie, and her determination to turn away from the dangers of the imagination and make a career in the world of the nonfictional, to make films that insisted, as he had insisted, on the absolute paramountcy of the truth. This is real life. In the late eighties she studied documentary filmmaking at the AFI Conservatory and graduated with flying colors and moved into her own apartment on Kings Road and was ready to make her father proud of her when his killer cheated her of the chance.
The woman had come to confess. She had carried a burden for a quarter of a century and it had weighed her down; after a lifetime of upright bearing she had entered a stooped old age. The burden, the years, the loneliness had made her body a question mark. She didn’t matter anymore, India thought, she had no power. She had come out of the house of power empty-handed, the flying bird-men had ripped her treasure out of her hands, and people were jeering at her in the street. Why had she come, it was not necessary to receive her condolences in person. She had come to assist the police with their inquiries, she said, sounding like a character from the days of black-and-white television. There aren’t any policemen here, India said, so there’s no one for you to assist.
The woman opened her purse and took out a photograph and tossed it down onto the bed. “The work it took to keep this out of the papers, hah! you have no idea.” Then, talking rapidly, just to get it said, the confession of the lie. “She didn’t die she gave you to me and went back to Kashmir I arranged a plane and a car I sent her where she wanted to go and I never heard of her again so she might as well have been dead but actually she didn’t die.” The name of the village, her mother’s village. The village of the traveling players. The village of Shalimar the clown. “Are you listening to me?” No, India wasn’t listening, she was hearing the words but the picture had all her attention. Her father was dead but her mother was coming back to life, except this wasn’t her mother, this was another lie, her mother was a great dancer, she had seduced Max by dancing for him, so this swollen woman could not be her. She saw the tears fall onto the photograph and realized they were her own. “I’m sorry,” the woman was saying. “Dreadful thing to have done, I suppose. Hah! I’m sure you think so. But she chose to give you up and I chose to take you in. I’m your mother. Forgive me. I made your father lie as well. I’m your mother. Forgive me. She didn’t die.”
Repentance is for the sinner. Forgiveness is for the victim: who looked at the damp photograph, and did not, could not, forgive. Who was all intransigence, not knowing that a harder blow was yet to fall.
“Kashmira,” the woman said, spinning on her heel, removing her hateful unwanted world-altering presence. “Kashmira Noman. That was your given name.” She felt as if the weight of her body had suddenly doubled, as if she had suddenly become the woman in the photograph. Gravity dragged at her and she fell backward on the bed, gasping for air. She heard the bed frame groan, saw in the mirror the mattress yield and sag. Kashmira. The weight of the word was too much for her to bear. Kashmira. Her mother was calling to her from the far side of the globe. Her mother who didn’t die. Kashmira, her mother called, come home. I’m coming, she called back. I’ll be there as fast as I can.