The Confusion

Something plopped to the ground behind Eliza, and she heard Caroline give out a little gasp of surprise. Eliza spun on her heel and confronted a tiny savage-a pygmy with a tomahawk. He’d been stalking her through the courtyard, creeping along behind the piles of goods. He had sprung from the lid of a crate taller than his head to menace her in a narrow pass. But now he was having second thoughts, for he had trapped himself between Eliza and Caroline. He turned around to look at the latter. Gazing now at the back of his head Eliza saw a whorl of blond hair that needed washing, a precipitous cowlick that needed trimming, a small body, just stretching out through its sheath of baby fat, that needed a bath. He was dressed in a breech-clout and moccasins, and carrying a weapon made from a terra-cotta pot-sherd that some grownup had patiently lashed to a stick.

Caroline had got over being startled and was trying to pick between amusement and annoyance. “Boo!” she shouted. The little blond Indian spun around as if to run away, but remembered too late that his escape was blocked by Eliza. His eye met hers for a moment, and she recognized it as an eye that belonged to her. He dropped the tomahawk, the better to scramble over a netted pallet of sugar-loaves, and before she could call his name, he had vanished into a pretend Massachusetts.

Caroline laughed, until she met Eliza’s eye, and took in her face; then she knew.

The court was surrounded by a covered gallery, where, when Eliza had last been here, men of the House of Hacklheber had sat at their bancas writing in their ledgers, and counting streams of outlandish coinage in and out of their massy strong-boxes. Eliza could see little of it now, save the tops of the arches; but a few moments later she heard a piping voice in German, making something known to “Papa,” and a moment later, a rumble of a laugh, followed by some patient explanation.

Hearing that voice, Eliza by some instinct turned and gazed up at a three-storey balcony that projected out into the space above the court, all decked out with golden Mercurys and other Barock commerce-emblems. She had once seen Lothar up there, talking to the Doctor, and staring down at her and Jack; but the thing was deserted now, a still-life of dusty windowpanes, faded curtains, and moss-slicked stone.

The man had begun to declaim in a loping singsong. Eliza knew little German. She looked to Caroline, who explained, “He reads from a book of tales.”

Eliza picked her way among the dusty goods, following the sound of that voice, until she stepped up onto the stone floor of the encircling gallery. This had been cleared of many of its bancas. Several paces away, a massive man squatted upon a black strong-box, all bound about with straps and hasps; but none of them was locked, which she looked on as suggesting it might be empty. The man had a great illustrated story-book open on one of his thighs. Perched on the other was the little blond Indian, who had leaned his head back on the man’s bosom, and drawn up a corner of his breechclout to chew on it. His spindly legs straddled the man’s leg. The moccasins pedaled slow air. He had got a falling look in his eyes, and the lids were unfolding. He glanced up at Eliza when she stepped into his field of view, but presently lost interest, and looked to his dreams. To him the appearance of the strange woman in the court of the house had been diverting, but only for a moment, and alarming, but only until “Papa” told him everything was going to be fine. “Papa,” who was Lothar von Hacklheber, kept reading the story-not, Eliza, thought, out of any studied effort to ignore her, but because no parent who knows the rules of the game interrupts a story just when a child has tucked his wings and settled into the long glide to sleep. A pair of gold-rimmed half-glasses perched on Lothar’s cratered nose, and when he reached the end of a page he would lick a finger, turn a page, and glance up at her with mild curiosity. The boy’s lids drooped lower and lower, more and more of the breechclout made its way into his mouth to be sucked on-a sight that produced an ache in Eliza’s breasts as they remembered what it was to let down milk. Presently Lothar shut the book, and glanced around for a place to set it-a gesture that brought Caroline running up to take it from his hand. Tightening a burly arm around the boy’s chest, he leaned back, making of his body a sort of great pillowy couch, and somehow levitated to his feet. He turned his back on the visitors and padded on bare feet through a doorway, then laid the boy into a sort of makeshift Indian-hammock that had been strung diagonally across a disused office. After spreading some blankets over the child, he straightened up, emerged into the gallery, and pulled the door to behind him-leaving it cracked, as Eliza the mother well knew, so that he could hear if the boy cried.