We Never Talk About My Brother Read online

  Antonio had long since prepared a hiding place for King Pelles and the Grand Vizier in case of just such an emergency. It lay under the floor of his own bedroom, so cunningly made and so close-fit that it was impossible to tell which boards might turn on hinges, or how to make them open, even if you knew. The two men were down there, motionless in the dark, well before the soldiers had reached the farmhouse; until the first fist hammered on the front door, the only sound they heard was the beating of each other’s hearts.

  The soldiers were polite, as soldiers go. They trampled no chickens, broke nothing in the house, and kept their hands off Antonio’s fresh stock of winter ale, last of the season. Filling the kitchen with their size and the noise of their bodies, they treated Nerissa and Clara with truly remarkable courtesy; and their captain offered boiled sweets to the children clustered behind them, even responding with a good-humored chuckle when little Martine kicked his shin. Nor did they ask a single question concerning guests, or visitors, or new-hired laborers. Indeed, they were so amiable and considerate, by contrast with what the family had expected, that it took Nerissa a moment longer than it should have to realize that they had not been sent for the king and the Grand Vizier at all.

  They had come for her husband.

  “You see, ma’am,” the Captain explained, as three of his men laid hold of Antonio, who had bolted too late for the back door, “the war just keeps going on. Wars, I mean. It’s chaos, madness, really it is, ever since that idiot Pelles started the whole thing. Everyone turning against everyone else—whole regiments changing sides, generals selling out their own troops—mutiny over there, rebellion here, betrayal that way, corruption this way... and what’s a poor soldier to do but follow his orders, no matter who’s giving them today? And my orders all winter have been to round up every single warm body, which means every able, breathing male with both legs under him, and ship them straightaway to the front. And so that’s what I do.”

  “The front,” Nerissa said numbly. “Which front? Where is the battle?”

  The Captain spread his arms in dramatic frustration. “Well, I don’t know which front, do I? As many of them as there are these days? Somebody else tells me that when we get there. Very sorry to be snatching away your breadwinner, ma’am—’pon my soul, I am—but there it is, you see, and I put it to you, what’s a poor soldier to do?” He turned irritably toward the soldiers struggling with Antonio. “Hold him, blast you! What’s the bloody matter with you?”

  In the moment that his gaze was not on her, Nerissa reached for her favorite butchering knife. Behind her, Clara’s hand closed silently on a cleaver. Only Martine saw, and drew breath to scream more loudly than she ever had in her short life. But the Captain was never to know how close he was to death in that moment, because just then King Pelles walked alone into the kitchen.

  He wore his royal robes, and his crown as well, which the children had never seen in all the time he had lived with them. Nodding pleasantly at the soldiers, he said to the Captain, “Let the man go. You will have a much richer prize to show your general than some poor farmer.”

  The Captain was dumb with amazement, turning all sorts of colors as he gaped at the king. His men, thoroughly astounded themselves, eased their grip on Antonio, who promptly burst free and headed for the door a second time. Some would have given chase, but King Pelles snapped out again, “Let him go!” and it was a king’s order, prisoner or no. The men fell back.

  “We weren’t looking for you, sir,” the Captain said, almost meekly. “We thought you were dead.”

  “Well, how much better for you that I’m not,” the king replied briskly. “There will be a bonus involved, surely, and you certainly should be able to trade me to one side or another—possibly all of them, if you manage it right. I know all about managing,” he added, in a somewhat different voice.

  A young officer just behind the captain demanded, “Where is the Grand Vizier? He was seen with you on the road.”

  King Pelles shrugged lightly and sighed. “And that was where he died, on the way here, poor chap. I buried him myself.” He turned back to the Captain. “Where are you supposed to take me, if I may ask?”

  “To the new king,” the Captain muttered in answer. “To King Phoebus.”

  “To my brother?” It was the king’s turn to be astonished. “My brother is king now?”

  “As of three days ago, anyway. When I left headquarters, he was.” The Captain spread his arms wide again. “What do I know, these days?”

  Even in his happiest moments on Nerissa and Antonio’s farm, the king had never laughed as he laughed now, with a kind of delight no less rich for being ironic. “Well,” he said finally. “Well, by all means, let us go to my brother. Let us go to King Phoebus, then—and on the way, perhaps we might talk about managing.” He removed his crown, smiling as he handed it to the Captain. “There you are. Can’t be king if you don’t have a crown, you know.”

  Nerissa and Clara stood equally as stunned as the men who cautiously laid hands on the unresisting King Pelles; but the two youngest children set up a wail of angry protest when they began leading him away. They clung to his legs and wept, and neither the Captain nor their mother could part them from him. That took the king himself, who finally turned to put his arms around them, calling each by name, and saying, “Remember the stories. My stories will always be with you.” He embraced the two women, saying to Clara in a low voice, “Take care of him, as he took care of me.” Then he went away with the soldiers, eyes clear and a smile on his face.

  If the Captain had looked back, he might well have seen the Grand Vizier, who came wandering into the kitchen a moment later, nursing a large bruise on his cheekbone, and another already forming on his jaw. Clara flew to him, as he said dazedly, “He hit me. I wouldn’t let him surrender himself alone, so then he.... Call them back—I’m his Vizier, he can’t go without me. Call them back.”

  “Hush,” Clara said, holding him. “Hush.”

  In time the long night of wars, rebellions, and retaliations of every sort slowly gave way at least to truces born of simple exhaustion, and reliable news became easier to come by, even for wary hillfolk like themselves. Thus the Grand Vizier was able to discover that the king’s brother Phoebus had quite quickly been overthrown, very likely while the soldiers were still on the road with their captive. But further he could not go. He never found out what had become of King Pelles, and after some time he came to realize that he did not really want to.

  “As long as we don’t know anything certainly,” he said to his family, “it is always possible that he might still be alive. Somewhere. I cannot speak for anyone else, but that is the only way I can live with his sacrifice.”

  “Perhaps sacrifice was the only way he could live,” suggested his wife. The Grand Vizier turned to her in some surprise, and Clara smiled at him. “I heard him in the night too,” she said.

  “I hear his stories,” young Martine said importantly. “I close my eyes when I get into bed, and he tells me a story.”

  “Yes,” said the Grand Vizier softly. “Yes, he tells me stories too.”

  THE LAST AND ONLY,

  OR,

  MR. MOSCOWITZ BECOMES FRENCH

  In one way this is the oldest story in the book; and in another, one of the newest. My memory is that I started it in the late 1960s, when my family and I had settled into our first house with real central heating, which was located in farming country just outside Watsonville, California. I sent an early version off to my agent, Elizabeth Otis, in New York, and in so doing initiated a sputtering cycle of rewrites and rejections that went on quietly in the background for a couple of years. By that time I’d stumbled into screenwriting, and for the next decade I largely abandoned prose fiction while in hot pursuit of the first serious money I’d ever seen. “The Last and Only” languished in my battered, dangerous filing cabinet until well past the turn of the new century, when Connor Cochran—once more exploring the dark continent of that cabinet with gu
n and camera—came across it and asked me to try again from a slightly different angle. What happened next was the oddest collaboration I’ve ever experienced, in which one of the two writers at the table was a younger, hairier me whom I didn’t always recognize and only barely remembered.

  It often happens that stories have to wait a very long time for the author to catch up with what they already know. But usually not this long.

  Once upon a time, there lived in California a Frenchman named George Moscowitz. His name is of no importance—there are old families in France named Wilson and Holmes, and the first president of the Third Republic was named MacMahon—but what was interesting about Mr. Moscowitz was that he had not always been French. Nor was he entirely French at the time we meet him, but he was becoming perceptibly more so every day. His wife, whose name was Miriam, drew his silhouette on a child’s blackboard and filled him in from the feet up with tricolor chalk, adding a little more color daily. She was at mid-thigh when we begin our story.

  Most of the doctors who examined Mr. Moscowitz agreed that his affliction was due to some sort of bug that he must have picked up in France when he and Mrs. Moscowitz were honeymooning there, fifteen years before. In its dormant stage, the bug had manifested itself only as a kind of pleasant Francophilia: on their return from France Mr. Moscowitz had begun to buy Linguaphone CDs, and to get up at six in the morning to watch a cable television show on beginner’s French. He took to collecting French books and magazines, French music and painting and sculpture, French recipes, French folklore, French attitudes, and, inevitably, French people. As a librarian in a large university, he came in contact with a good many French exchange students and visiting professors, and he went far out of his way to make friends with them—Mr. Moscowitz, shy as a badger. The students had a saying among themselves that if you wanted to be French in that town, you had to clear it with Monsieur Moscowitz, who issued licenses and cartes de séjour. The joke was not especially unkind, because Mr. Moscowitz often had them to dinner at his home, and in his quiet delight in the very sound of their voices they found themselves curiously less bored with themselves, and with one another. Their companions at dinner were quite likely to be the ignorant Marseillais tailor who got all of Mr. Moscowitz’s custom, or the Canuck coach of the soccer team, but there was something so touching in Mr. Moscowitz’s assumption that all French-speaking people must be naturally at home together that professors and proletariat generally managed to find each other charming and valuable. And Mr. Moscowitz himself, speaking rarely, but sometimes smiling uncontrollably, like an exhalation of joy—he was a snob in that he preferred the culture and manners of another country to his own, and certainly a fool in that he could find wisdom in every foolishness uttered in French—he was marvelously happy then, and it was impossible for those around him to escape his happiness. Now and then he would address a compliment or a witticism to his wife, who would smile and answer softly, “Merci,” or “La-la,” for she knew that at such moments he believed without thinking about it that she too spoke French.

  Mrs. Moscowitz herself was, as must be obvious, a patient woman of a tolerant humor, who greatly enjoyed her husband’s enjoyment of all things French, and who believed, firmly and serenely, that this curious obsession would fade with time, to be replaced by bridge or chess, or—though she prayed not—golf. “At least he’s dressing much better these days,” she told her sister Dina, who lived in Scottsdale, Arizona. “Thank God you don’t have to wear plaid pants to be French.”

  Then, after fifteen years, whatever it was that he had contracted in France, if that was what he had done, came fully out of hiding; and here stood Mr. Moscowitz in one doctor’s office after another, French from his soles to his ankles, to his shins, to his knees, and still heading north for a second spring. (Mrs. Moscowitz’s little drawing is, of course, only a convenient metaphor—if anything her husband was becoming French from his bones out.) He was treated with drugs as common as candy and as rare as turtle tears by doctors ranging from Johns Hopkins specialists to a New Guinea shaman; he was examined by herbalists and honey-doctors, and by committees of medical men so reputable as to make illness in their presence seem almost criminal; and he was dragged to a crossroads one howling midnight to meet with a half-naked, foamy-chinned old man who claimed to be the son of Merlin’s affair with Nimue, and a colonel in the Marine Reserves besides. This fellow’s diagnosis was supernatural possession; his prescribed remedy would cost Mr. Moscowitz a black pig (and the pig its liver), and was impractical, but the idea left Mr. Moscowitz thoughtful for a long time.

  In bed that night, he said to his wife, “Perhaps it is possession. It’s frightening, yes, but it’s exciting too, if you want the truth. I feel something growing inside me, taking shape as it crowds me out, and the closer I get to disappearing, the clearer it becomes. And yet, it is me too, if you understand—I wish I could explain to you how it feels—it is like, ’ow you say....”

  “Don’t say that,” Mrs. Moscowitz interrupted with tears in her voice. She had begun to whimper quietly when he spoke of disappearing. “Only TV Frenchmen talk like that.”

  “Excuse-moi, ma vieille. The more it crowds me, the more it makes me feel like me. I feel a whole country growing inside me, thousands of years, millions of people, stupid, crazy, shrewd people, and all of them me. I never felt like that before, I never felt that there was anything inside me, even myself. Now I’m pregnant with a whole country, and I’m growing fat with it, and one day—” He began to cry himself then, and the two of them huddled small in their bed, holding hands all night long. He dreamed in French that night, as he had been doing for weeks, but he woke up still speaking it, and he did not regain his English until he had had his first cup of coffee. It took him longer each morning thereafter.

  A psychiatrist whom they visited when Mr. Moscowitz’s silhouette was French to the waist commented that his theory of possession by himself was a way of sidling up to the truth that Mr. Moscowitz was actually willing his transformation. “The unconscious is ingenious at devising methods of withdrawal,” he explained, pulling at his fingertips as though milking a cow, “and national character is certainly no barrier to a mind so determined to get out from under the weight of being an American. It’s not as uncommon as you might think, these days.”

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit?” whispered Mr. Moscowitz to his wife.

  “I have a patient,” mused the psychiatrist, “who believes that he is gradually being metamorphosed into a roc, such a giant bird as carried off Sindbad the Sailor to lands unimaginable and riches beyond comprehension. He has asked me to come with him to the very same lands when his change is complete.”

  “Qu’est-ce qu’il dit? Qu’est-ce que c’est, roc?” Mrs. Moscowitz shushed her husband nervously and said, “Yes, yes, but what about George? Do you think you can cure him?”

  “I won’t be around,” said the psychiatrist. There came a stoop of great wings outside the window, and the Moscowitzes fled.

  “Well, there it is,” Mrs. Moscowitz said when they were home, “and I must confess I thought as much. You could stop this stupid change yourself if you really wanted to, but you don’t want to stop it. You’re withdrawing, just the way he said, you’re escaping from the responsibility of being plain old George Moscowitz in the plain old United States. You’re quitting, and I’m ashamed of you—you’re copping out.” She hadn’t used the phrase since her own college days, at Vassar, and it made her feel old and even less in control of this disturbing situation.

  “Cop-out, cop-out,” said Mr. Moscowitz thoughtfully. “What charm! I love it very much, the American slang. Cop-out, copping out. I cop out, tu cop out, they all cop out....”

  Then Mrs. Moscowitz burst into tears, and picking up her colored chalks, she scribbled up and down and across the neat silhouette of her husband until the chalk screamed and broke, and the whole blackboard was plastered red, white, and blue; and as she did this, she cried “I don’t care, I don’t care if you’re escap
ing or not, or what you change into. I wouldn’t care if you turned into a cockroach, if I could be a cockroach too.” Her eyes were so blurred with tears that Mr. Moscowitz seemed to be sliding away from her like a cloud. He took her in his arms then, but all the comfort he offered her was in French, and she cried even harder.

  It was the only time she ever allowed herself to break down. The next day she set about learning French. It was difficult for her, for she had no natural ear for language, but she enrolled in three schools at once—one for group study, one for private lessons, and the other online—and she worked very hard. She even dug out her husband’s abandoned language CDs and listened to them constantly. And during her days and evenings, if she found herself near a mirror, she would peer at the plump, tired face she saw there and say carefully to it, “ Je suis la professeur. Vous êtes l’étudiante. Je suis française. Vous n’êtes pas française.” These were the first four sentences that the recordings spoke to her every day. It had occurred to her—though she never voiced the idea—that she might be able to will the same change that had befallen her husband on herself. She told herself often, especially after triumphing over her reflection, that she felt more French daily; and when she finally gave up the pretense of being transformed, she said to herself, “It’s my fault. I want to change for him, not for myself. It’s not enough.” She kept up with her French lessons, all the same.

  Mr. Moscowitz, on his part, was finding it necessary to take English lessons. His work in the library was growing more harassing every day: he could no longer read the requests filed by the students—let alone the forms and instructions on his own computer screen—and he had to resort to desperate guessing games and mnemonic systems to find anything in the stacks or on the shelves. His condition was obvious to his friends on the library staff, and they covered up for him as best they could, doing most of his work while a graduate student from the French department sat with him in a carrel, teaching him English as elementary as though he had never spoken it. But he did not learn it quickly, and he never learned it well, and his friends could not keep him hidden all the time. Inevitably, the Chancellor of the university interested himself in the matter, and after a series of interviews with Mr. Moscowitz—conducted in French, for the Chancellor was a traveled man who had studied at the Sorbonne—announced regretfully that he saw no way but to let Mr. Moscowitz go. “You understand my position, Georges, my old one,” he said, shrugging slightly and twitching his mouth. “It is a damage, of course, well understood, but there will be much severance pay and a pension of the fullest.” The presence of a Frenchman always made the Chancellor a little giddy.