Ten Days in the Hills (53 page)

But then Isabel frowned and threw herself back in her seat. She said, “Thanks for coming. I can’t believe what a mess this is. I really hope Stoney has another set of keys, I really do, but, you know, having another set of keys is not his style.”

“What is his style?”

Isabel considered this question. Finally, she said, “Wishing he had bothered to have another set of keys made when he realized that he only had one set.”

Elena didn’t say anything. One of the first things she always did with a key was duplicate it, mark it, and hang it on the key board in her kitchen closet.

Isabel sighed. “What I really hate is those strings of choices that led to the disaster. For example, I brought two pairs of jeans with me up the hill, only two, because the others were dirty and I hadn’t bothered to do any laundry all last week. So, this morning, I looked in my suitcase and I saw the loose ones and the tight ones, and Stoney was coming out of the bathroom and looking at me, and that made me feel very sassy, so I put on the tight ones, but if I’d put on the loose ones, the keys wouldn’t have squeezed out of my back pocket as I was standing up, and, you know, I heard the splash, but it just didn’t occur to me what was splashing until a moment later, when it flushed, and I realized that the keys had been in my back pocket.”

“Why did you go out in the first place?”

“Oh, shit! Where are we? That reminds me! We have to go up to our house, because I went out to get my birth-control pills, because I forgot them. I’m sorry. It’s so out of the way.”

Elena had to admire the way Isabel slipped that phrase “birth-control pills” into the conversation so naturally. She said, “Better to have them. Maybe we should call and see what other things people forgot.” The L.A.
Times,
she knew, could well be lying right there by the front door, and she could pick it up without seeming to be doing anything besides going into the house.

“I guess Dad and Stoney are in the meeting with that guy.”

“They were when I left, but none of us saw them.”

“He already financed another movie. Did you know that? Stoney and I watched it in our room last night. It was animated. I guess he found a studio in Japan to do it, so it was Japanese with Russian subtitles, but we could make out the story. I enjoyed it.”

“What was it called?”

“Something about hawks. I couldn’t make that out. Anyway, it begins in 1180, because the date showed on the screen first thing, and the main character is Saladin. At the beginning, you see Saladin and two companions take off their golden robes and put on humbler dress, and then they leave what Stoney thought was Damascus and head west. You know, Saladin was a Kurd. Isn’t that interesting? We learned that in my medieval-history class, when we studied the Crusades. The scene changes fairly frequently but smoothly as they travel through Turkey and Greece and Albania, and pretty soon they are in Hungary, and then they go down through the Alps into northern Italy, and I mean this part passes in only a few minutes—it’s a beautiful backlit panorama, in anime, of course, of all the landscapes—”

“That George W. Bush could have visited but didn’t care to.”

“Well, exactly. Anyway, we were fascinated. Somewhere in northern Italy, they’re walking along, looking pretty bedraggled by this time, and they encounter two men out hawking. It’s almost nightfall. When they’ve finished talking, the one local man sends the other with the travelers, and as soon as they leave, he gallops home. In the meantime, the second man takes the travelers down the back roads. They arrive at the castle, owned by the first man, and he welcomes them with feasting. You can tell that the man who owns the castle is curious, and that he realizes these guys are important. After everyone is in bed, he sneaks out to where the horses are, and he looks into one of the packs and finds gold coins and silk cloth gleaming in the moonlight. So he sends a messenger into the nearby city to his wife, who is a beautiful young woman in the Japanese anime tradition—”

“Which means?”

“Which means she has long hair hanging over her face, and great big eyes. But she’s dressed like a medieval Italian woman. The next day, all the men wake up and they go hawking in the country, and Saladin admires the Italian guy’s hawk, and the hawking scenes really are brilliant, the way the hawks fly up toward the sky, then drop on the prey, and everything is reflected in the surface of a lake. When they go into town, the beautiful wife has put on this fabulous feast, and all for these dusty, bedraggled merchants. The next morning, the husband and wife give the travelers five new horses and some new clothes and watch them go off, and from the dialogue even we realized that they think their visitors might have been Jesus and two of his disciples.

“Then it’s five years later, and we see Saladin conquering Jerusalem, and there’s a lot of typical anime violence, Japanese-style swordplay, and then the next scene is back at the castle in Italy, and the beautiful wife is weeping and saying goodbye to the husband, who is off to the Crusades. There are lots of scenes of sickness, dying, and burial, and then the ones who are left attack Jerusalem and are beaten, and the Islamic army goes through and kills and enslaves whoever is left, which includes our friend. A couple of the Crusaders manage to escape, and the Italian guy gives one of them a message for the wife.

“In the next scene, the Italian guy is dressed in humble robes, wearing a turban, and working in the palace hawkery or whatever it’s called, training hawks. The wife back in Italy weeps and grieves at the news of his death, then meets and rejects a suitor. Her brothers come in and threaten to imprison and beat her if she doesn’t agree to get married, so she points to a barren tree, from which we gather that when the tree leafs out again she will marry someone, but not before. And then there’s a scene of the messenger being waylaid and killed on the way home from Jerusalem. Meanwhile, back in Damascus, Saladin is out hawking. The hawk flies out into the late-afternoon sun in the same way the hawk had done in the earlier scene, and then there’s this terrific shot of everything reflecting in the surface of a pool in an oasis, and at that point Saladin looks directly at his captive and realizes that it is that man who had been so hospitable, so, the next scene, you see the Italian as a guest in the palace, eating at a banquet. Then they cut to the tree flowering in the courtyard of the castle, and the wife sitting beneath it, weeping.

“In the next scene, you see her being fitted for her wedding gown. Meanwhile, an Italian shows up at the castle in Damascus, and our Italian visits him, asks the news, and then he runs to Saladin. Cut to the tree, budding out—”

“I love all of this natural stuff,” said Elena.

“Well, the story was clearly not a modern story, and more Disney story than anything else. But the backgrounds and settings were mesmerizing and incredibly detailed, the way anime always is. Cut to our Italian, realizing that no ship could get him there fast enough. So—and I love this scene—they take him to a room in a high tower in the palace, and they lay him out on a bed and they give him a potion and he falls asleep, and then Saladin puts many treasures on the bed, and the magician does his thing, and out the bed goes through the window and into the night sky, and it sails over the Mediterranean, and you can see the moon up above and the tiny ships down below, and pretty soon, the bed comes in for a landing, just before dawn, in front of the altar in a church. As the sun comes up, an old sleepy man creeps into the church to light the candles, and—boom—there’s this bed with this inert man in it, and the old guy drops his candle and runs, and a few moments later, as our Italian is waking up, the old guy and his boss tiptoe up to the bed, and the two guys recognize each other and hug. The next thing you see is the wedding procession approaching the church, and the bride looks sad, but her brothers are poking her from behind, and when she gets into the church, she sees this strange man in Islamic robes and a beard and a turban, and he keeps catching her eye, so she sends him a goblet of wine, which he drinks, and then he puts a ring in it and sends it back to her. She realizes who it is, and runs to him, and they embrace. The last scene is of them on their horses, out hawking in the light of dawn, and the two hawks fly away together and return, reflected in the surface of the lake.”

Elena was passing Mandeville Canyon. She said, “That sounds very nice. Maybe he could, or should, make this Ukrainian movie in anime.”

“Well, Stoney suggested that. But Mike told him anime is all very nice for peace, but for war you need real flesh. That’s exactly what he said. In English.”

“He seems kind of obsessed with the Middle East. I thought he was Russian.”

“I guess he’s from some part that is more Asian. But look at the place we’re staying. He’s like the walking manifestation of globalization.”

Elena turned up the hill toward Max’s house.

Isabel went on, “It was a nice movie. It was reassuring in some way. Here it was made in Japan about Syria and Italy, with Russian subtitles, and no Americans were around, forcing it to be about American needs and wants, or telling it to be a certain way. It was about being friends without any reference to Americans at all.”

“If only they could ignore us,” said Elena, and Isabel nodded, but then said, “My economics professor always said that soon enough they will be ignoring us, once China is the superpower.” Elena groaned. She said, “I find it so hard to get used to being the bad guy.”

“Do you?” said Isabel. She pursed her lips and pushed her hair out of her face, then said, “I think that’s because you’re white. Against all the evidence, white people in America always cling to their own innocence and forgive themselves for whatever they’ve done, or if they themselves did not do it, whatever was done in their names. We used to talk about that in my job in New York. Is it guilt? I don’t think it even rises to that level.”

“How about ignorance?”

“Is that all it is? I don’t think so. I think of it as a sense of entitlement. I mean, it goes beyond that time we were talking and Charlie couldn’t get over the idea that someone might come and try to take his house or his car or something. There are so many histories of the last fifty years that show that Americans haven’t been the good guys at all, and that a lot of people in the world are justifiably resentful of American interference in their national life, and I’m not even talking about old genocides against the native peoples and crimes against humanity, like slavery, that it took generations to acknowledge. I’m only talking about assassinated leaders we didn’t like, and giving Saddam Hussein weapons of mass destruction that he used on the Kurds. I mean, everyone just goes along thinking that that kind of sensitivity about criticizing white people in this country is justified or normal. So, yeah, you hate thinking of yourself as the bad guy, but why are you only starting to think of yourself as the bad guy right now?” Then she glanced at Elena a bit defiantly.

And, yes, Elena could feel it in herself, even as Isabel described it, that moral resentment—the very things she herself could have and sometimes had asserted with a feeling of self-righteousness irritated her coming from Isabel, tall, good-looking, privileged, twenty-three years old, well educated, and, yes, in the official tradition of race in America, black, but hardly justified in calling herself that. Irritation, the feeling of her pride beginning to engulf her reason and her better nature. But Elena didn’t say anything, only continued up the hill, trying to stem that “Who does she think she is?” reaction she was having. She thought of Max, because, of course, here was his house. But Max’s image did not stem the vertigo. She thought of Simon. But that was worse. Her greatest attachment was to Simon, and she had cultivated her attachment with love and care, but, truthfully, if she were to admit it, she was a cat who had given birth to a dog. The two of them, mother and son, would not be nesting together ever again. And what would happen to Simon in such a world as this new one?

She pulled up in front of Max’s house. Isabel threw open her door and jumped out, but Elena sat there for a moment and reassembled herself. She had to think of her book, her kitchen, her house in the flats of Beverly Hills. She had to think of her clothes and her habits and the cable-knit sweater she was knitting that she hadn’t touched in months. She had to think of the orderly manner in which her days had progressed before this war, and to remember that they could progress like that again, task by task, crumb by crumb dropping to the floor of the dark forest, showing the way out again. She had to think of her many convictions and beliefs, and tell herself that they constituted a life, and as she thought of them, she saw Isabel swoop down and pick up the newspapers and carry them into the house, and she knew that she wouldn’t have the courage to ask for them.

Meanwhile, back at the manse,
Stoney was having several self-defeating thoughts. The first of these was that every man in the room with him, in the
My Fair Lady
study, was both older and bigger than he was. Mike was almost as tall as Max and two sizes larger (forty-six in the chest anyway—though, from the looks of his jacket, his tailor measured him by the millimeter). Stoney himself would have liked to think that he wore a forty; in fact, a forty was a little roomy for him, but, should he admit to the thirty-eight, then that would mean that he wasn’t working out as much as he should be and that pretty soon he would weigh less than Isabel, or perhaps not, but last night in the Amber Room, when he took off his shirt, he had tried not to cross directly in front of the mirror. He cleared his throat and tried to project a slightly deeper voice. He said, “Mike, Alex—”