Daughters of Babylon (8 page)

Dr. Shirazi did not want her to come closer. He had curled his upper body to one side, as if tracing an arc of protection with his shoulder. He had dropped his chin and was peering at her over his glasses, as if seeing her blurred made her less real.

“You have come to take her away.”

“Oh, no, not at all, I’m not taking anyone or anything away.” She paused to observe the effect of her words. “I’m only here to organize what Vivian has left for us. I’m here to make things easier for you and everyone she loved. Of course, if you’d rather I didn’t, that’s okay too.” Blythe would probably like nothing better than to hear that Silvina had changed her mind and was returning to Toronto for the summer.

The angle of his shoulders shifted a few degrees toward normal.

“You’re the girl she hired? The one who’s good with patterns?”

Silvie felt a small, hard punch to the heart. Vivian hadn’t mentioned anything about Dr. Shirazi suffering from dementia. She always spoke of him with the British endearment of “my”, as in, “My Tar is at it again, we’ve enough caraway rye loaves to provision the French Foreign Legion.”

“Yes, she did hire me once, a long time ago. I was only fifteen. I doubt that she saw much pattern potential in me.”

“We were supposed to leave together. I have all the paperwork. I could show you.”

“I’m sure everything is in order, Doctor. I’m also very certain that Viv would love some help in organizing those wonderful mementos you’ve gathered. They are going to bring you both much pleasure.”

Pretending Viv was here and all was normal seemed to relax him. He released the awkward set of his shoulders, even straightened a little. “She insisted it be you.”

“Pardon me?”

“There’ll be people after I’m gone, she said, who will make claims and want to overturn things, but my Little Herring will know what to do. She’ll slither right through them.”

Silvina’s vision went funny, as if she’d been driving and suddenly shifted her focus to the windshield instead of the road. “Viv said that?”

Dr. Shirazi nodded. “Her very words.”

The spelling of Silvina’s name on her birth certificate was Silviina, with two i’s. There was probably no one alive anymore who knew that or cared. Only two people had ever called her
Pikku Silli
, a Finnish play on words that meant Little Herring. One of them was her grandmother, Helmi Kiviäinen, who died twenty-two years ago when Silvina was fifteen. The second was Vivian, who somehow extracted that detail from her in their first five minutes of conversation. Those two events occurred three hundred miles and several months apart, and though Silvie had not pulled them together in her mind for a very long time, she recalled her first impressions of Vivian now as if they’d taken place minutes ago. She’d had no inkling yet of the woman’s identity—there’d been no introduction—but her bold square jaw, hazel eyes that pulled and plucked at you, the Scottish burr that sounded to Silvie like an army of Highlanders drumming through heather made her feel as though she’d landed not in the northern Ontario mining town of Sudbury but in some other century. She could feel the rolling Rs on the surface of her skin.

Your grrrrandmother did not give you a merrre nickname. She gave you a totem, you know, and a fine one. We have herrrrings in Scotland, call them kippers, when tinned. They’re a skinny wee fish that can slither unnoticed thrrrough the tightest places. Would you say that describes you, then?

Silvina had no recollection of whether she said yes or no, only that she’d felt mortified and ill equipped. No one where she came from spoke with such intensity, with such fullness of being. She also felt excitement rapping—
IneedthisjobIneedthisjobIneedthisjob
—at her breast like a woodpecker. How she would love to say to Vivian now, “Yes, my grandmother named me well, though I’m still in the process of learning to slither.”

Dr. Shirazi’s gaunt face was taking on colour; his eyes were even twinkling a bit.

“I’m sorry I missed the funeral,” Silvina said. “Was it well attended?”

“Standing room only and out into the parking lot. I know of at least three memorials in the planning stages, in London, Edinburgh, Broadway. What do they call them now—celebrations of life? Not everyone loved her, of course, but ...” He shrugged in the fatalistic manner of his Middle Eastern roots.

Viv had said once, “My Tar is Persian, you know. His family can trace their roots to Kayumars, first king at the dawn of Creation.”

Given the man’s frailty, Silvie decided not to probe the matter of people who did not love Vivian. “I know she was excited about returning to the dig with you.”

“Oh, yes. Re-opening Tel-Hemat had been our fondest dream for years. We tried once before, I expect she told you. All the visas and permits were arranged, she had turned down I don’t know many scripts, and then Saddam set fire to the oil wells of Kuwait.” With his fingertips he tapped the part in his hair as if to be sure it was still ruler straight. “How kind the looters and tanks have been to the site of Old Bab-El remains to be seen—now, where are my manners? You have traveled all this way, Ms Kestral. You will take tea, a bit of refreshment before I show you the house?”

“Call me Silvie. I’d love some, thank you. Tea is what brought Viv and me together.”

She accompanied him to the
foganha
, and because he insisted, please, to tell him everything she could remember of their meeting, Silvie recounted that the tea had been Twinings English Breakfast, and it came in little red envelopes that sat in a chipped sugar bowl that was sometimes used as a prop in the plays Vivian directed during her one and only season in Canada.

She was already famous in Britain for leading roles with Peter O’Toole and Alan Bates, and for her fiery affairs with politicians on both sides of the Atlantic—Dr. Shirazi, to Silvina’s surprise, added that piece and seemed pleasantly amused rather than jealous. Silvie, however, had known nothing of Vivian Lansdowne’s star quality the day she stepped off the Greyhound bus with a backpack and $7.42 in her pocket.

The local police in Silvie’s home town of Thunder Bay had sent information across CPIC, the microfiche data system, to provincial and federal police forces: Missing, Caucasian female, age 15; height, 5’8”; weight, 110 pounds; blue eyes, dark blonde hair. But kids ran away all the time and when there was no evidence of foul play, no immediate family to keep the pressure on, cases like hers slipped quietly into filing cabinet drawers.

It was a shame, folks agreed in the Finnish-Canadian community on the north shore of Lake Superior, that something couldn’t be done to prevent the bank foreclosing on Helmi Kiviäinen’s boarding house; and if her son-in-law had kept a head on his shoulders and a certain something in his pants—after all, those rich American doctors and lawyers paid good money to fly in bush planes to Twice Past Sunset—his fishing camp, that poor child might have stood a chance. But people have to look after their own, and no, officer, I haven’t seen the girl in this photo since her grandmother’s funeral. St. Luke’s Lutheran paid for the service, the meal, even a grave marker out of their compassionate fund, not that the family ever attended church. I don’t know what direction she might have gone. Roger Kestral’s fishing camp has been closed for years; I don’t think the road’s even open anymore. She’s probably gone west, to Vancouver. That’s where most teenagers end up these days, isn’t it?

A few blocks from the bus station, Silvie noticed a sign in the door of the Sudbury Theatre Centre:

Box Office Manager Needed Immediately

Apply Within

“And so, within I went.”

Dr. Shirazi set a small platter near the gift basket. “Would you do the honour? The pistachios and dried apricots from
La Sorcière de Miel
are wonderful.”

While the archeologist prepared mint tea, Silvie arranged fruit and nuts on the dish and recalled her interview with the stage manager named Toby. “I’d never met a man with pink-tipped hair and black nail polish. And I thought he wasn’t using his real voice.

“Within minutes, he had me near tears. No, I had no theatre experience, no, I had never worked in a box office—then why are you wasting my time, he wanted to know. I need someone to start in three hours.”

Dr. Shirazi had a glorious laugh that rolled out of him in layers. Silvie was beginning to understand the attraction. They carried the tea things into the parlour and sat across from each other in the leather wing chairs, in front of the fireplace that, while still unlit, didn’t seem so cold anymore. And she told him of the moment when an imperious figure in a full tartan cape swept past the open door of the office where Toby was chewing a cuticle and muttering of disastrous opening nights, and said in a voice that wasn’t loud and yet rattled every corner of the room she wasn’t in: “Is there no one in this shambles of a theatre who can make a decent cuppa?”

Silvina’s insecurities blew apart in that instant, like a bird’s nest struck by lightning. All that the stage manager had discouraged her from expressing, like the discipline it took to run a boarding house with her grandmother, cooking three meals a day, seven days a week for eight full-time boarders; and the joy she experienced rowing on the lake at Twice Past Sunset; and the fact that her grandmother used to act in amateur theatre when she was younger; and they loved to watch TVO’s Saturday Night at the Movies together. And while most Finns drank coffee, those like her family who came from Karelia in the East, also enjoyed tea. And Silvie’s favourite heirloom, that she’d been forced to leave behind when she ran away to avoid being taken by the Children’s Aid and seeing the house she’d grown up in foreclose, had been the family’s sterling silver samovar.

“I shot out of the chair, ran into the hall and called out to the retreating figure in plaid, ‘I can make tea!’”

Dr. Shirazi threw his head back and laughed. “No wonder Vivian loved you on sight.”

He poured them each a second cup, then pulled several large coffee table books from the shelves that contained tinted colour photographs of his palatial family home in Tehran and the various summer palaces where he’d grown up. Yes, it was true what Viv had told her, that his family could trace their lineage to the first Persians mentioned in the Shahnameh, Book of Kings, and they counted among their closest friends, Mohammad Rez¬ā Shāh Pahlavī, the last Shah of Iran, and his wife, the Empress Farah.

And from there, he spun seamless tales of dervishes and djinns to the point that Silvie could no longer distinguish, and nor did she care, between metaphor and history, between stories of the Doctor growing up with a coterie of dressers and food tasters, and the summers he spent sifting through layers of Hittite civilization, until he fell in love with a young red-haired woman on the French Riviera, and though his parents were appalled at his dropping out of flight school and moving with a bunch of hippies to the south of France, because whatever Scottish Presbyterianism was, even if she was non-practicing, it certainly wasn’t Islam…

Dr. Shirazi glanced at the mantel clock above the fireplace. “Aah, forgive me, I have allowed my love of reminiscence to overtake good sense. There is a ship waiting in the harbour of Montpelier. I sail with her at dawn. And of course, you must have questions about this task to which you have so kindly agreed.”

She swallowed the last of her tea. “A few, yes.”

“I have prepared contact lists, they are in the upstairs study. Keys to the house, the outbuildings, safety deposit, and so on are in the
foganha
, hanging near the phone...”

“Speaking of phones,” Silvie said, gathering up the tea things, “do you have wi-fi here? I know there are places in southern France that are still dial-up.”

“Wi-fi?”

“Wireless.”

“Ah, yes, of course, in the bedroom. Reception isn’t always the best, but on Friday evenings, Radio Free Europe comes in quite clearly.”

Three short honks and two long ones came from a vehicle in the driveway.

“That would be Jean-Luc,” the Doctor said. “He’s taking me to the station. The house is yours until the first of September. I know you hope to be finished long before then. The furniture can stay, along with kitchen items. The new owners, I’m sure, would enjoy a turnkey operation.”

Silvie was about to ask who the new owners were, when Jean-Luc honked again, more urgently. “He forgot to pick up some things in Foix,” she said. “His wife was a bit upset.”

“Oh, she’s always upset with him. I’m going to tell him to turn the engine off while I give you a tour.”

“But you have a train to catch, don’t you?”

Dr. Shirazi bent over the plate of apricots and drew swirls in the air before selecting the plumpest. “Time waits for no man, except for the chauffeur of the Queen of Heaven. There’s a trick with the attic pull I need to show you.”

Talmont Castle
The Duchy of Aquitaine
SUMMER, A.D. 1141

Arturo peered through the open window of the fishing hut. He could not tear his eyes off the woman in a mulberry gown, who paced across the small room, looking skyward with both hands covering her mouth.

“I did not mean to speak harshly, Marie-Therèse,” she said, “and nor do I wish to drag anyone to eternal damnation with me, if that is the price of speaking my mind. But . . .” Here, she paused to level her gaze. “I am once again being squeezed in the middle, and I find this situation intolerable. The Holy Father waggles his finger, ordering me to rein Louis in because he’s still a boy, though he’s eighteen and more than capable of manly things. And Louis, husband and God’s chosen representative in affairs of state . . .”

The edge in her words while speaking of the king made Arturo’s heart rattle like a cage with a moulting cockerel inside.

“. . . throws his loyalty behind—not me, not his wife, but his dead father, Louis le Gros, and he was enormous, let me tell you. I have lost count of the times that Louis has sworn upon the head of St. James, while scourging himself through layers of brocade that he’d sooner burn in Hell than back down, then one snort from the Pope or the Count of Toulouse and he’s simpering again. Even God with His infinite patience must recognize at some point, for it’s certainly obvious to me, that not every royal head is equally appointed.”