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.
Mastan. I remember.
That is honor for me. That such a big big seth should recall. What a memory, sir. Your own son could not recall, a much younger man.
You met one of my sons.
Sir, in Mumbai, sir. Goes now by name Apu. Which is to say, went by said name. Apologies for my clumsy English. Condolences on your loss.
How did you get this number.
Sir, I was police officer, subsequently private security. These things are possible.
Pause.
What do you want.
Only to talk, sir. I have no authority, no power, I am retired, this is USA, no jurisdiction, nothing, cold case, and you are a so so powerful man and I, nobody. Only to clarify certain things. To satisfy myself before reaching my end. For my own satisfaction only.
And I should see you, why.
In case you want to know identity of persons who killed your son. I am supposing only that this is of interest.
Long pause.
Tomorrow morning. Nine A.M.
Sharp, sahib. On the dot. Thanking you in advance.
Still later, Riya is asleep, and is woken by her cellphone. To her very great surprise, the caller is Nero Golden.
Can you come?
Now? It’s the middle of the night.
I need to talk, and now I have the words, and maybe tomorrow I won’t have them.
Give me a moment.
Daughter, I need you now.
He was about to be eighty years old and had started forgetting very recent events but the past glowed more and more brightly in his memory like gold at the bottom of the Rhine. The river of his thought was no longer clear, its water an opaque and muddied flow, and within it his consciousness was slowly losing its grip on chronology, on what was then, what now, what was waking truth and what had been born in the fairyland of dreams. The library of time was disordered, its categories jumbled, its indexes scrambled or destroyed. There were good days and bad days but with every passing day it was his faraway yesterdays that shone more clearly than last week. Then the past called him on the phone in the dark of night and all he had buried rose from its grave all at once and swarmed around him and he made a phone call of his own. In what followed I hear an echo of another Hitchcock movie. We were no longer in Rear Window. We were entering the world of I Confess.
(You remember I Confess? A murderer confesses his crime to a Catholic priest who is bound by the rules of the confessional to keep the killer’s secret. Hitchcock hated Montgomery Clift’s Method-acting techniques, and some people hated the film’s total humorlessness, but Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol praised the film for its “majesty” in Cahiers du Cinéma, pointing out that as the priest is silenced, the film is dependent on the actor’s expressions. “Only these looks give us access to the mysteries of his thought. They are the most worthy and faithful messengers of the soul.” Riya Zachariassen, hurrying across Manhattan at dead of night, was no priestess, but she was about to receive a confession. Would she keep the secret? If so, how would her looks and glances communicate what she knew? And: would possession of the secret endanger her life?)