The Invisible Circus - Jennifer Egan [129]
He was squeezing her hands, his face so near Phoebe’s own that for a moment it eclipsed both ocean and cliff. She began to protest, then stopped. Wolf’s expression stopped her. Something had dropped away, laying bare a terrible knowledge she’d glimpsed in him before but never seen directly. His lips were white. Phoebe made a sound and stepped away.
Wolf released her hands. The determination fell from him, leaving a sick, questioning look. Phoebe covered her eyes, breathing into her hot palms.
“You were here,” she said softly.
Her words made the certainty fall against her with brutal coherence, unyielding as earth. She felt buried in it. She ran to the church and tried its door, but the door was bolted shut. She looked back at Wolf and found him watching her with that odd remoteness, as if his mind had switched off or simply fled, as if the pressures upon it were too much.
Phoebe approached him. In Wolf’s eyes she saw the damage clearly now, like broken glass underwater—obvious, once you knew what to look for. Abruptly Wolf twisted to one side, leaned over the wall and vomited down the cliff. Phoebe fled, sinking to the ground by the church, her eyes fixed to the convulsions of Wolf’s back. When he’d finished, he rose slowly, wiping an arm across his mouth. He was looking out to sea. Phoebe’s teeth chattered. Wolf went to the water fountain and took a long drink, splashing water on his face and then his hair, rubbing it in, then more on his face.
At last he came and sat on the ground beside her. Water dripped from his hair; he smelled of the sea wind. They didn’t speak. Silty dust blew in their faces. Sitting with her back against the church, Phoebe couldn’t see the ocean, only sky.
“I started thinking last night you might already know,” Wolf said, sounding short of breath. “Or be starting to guess.”
Phoebe stared at him. The event gaped before them, so gigantic. There seemed no way of approaching it. “Please talk,” she said. “Please.”
Wolf sat hunched over his bent knees, forehead resting on his wrists. He seemed unable to lift his head. “I saw her,” he said. “I saw her, and I let it happen. Can you believe that?” He looked up at Phoebe, anguish and incredulity mingling in his face as if some part of him were still questioning the truth of these assertions. “I saw her. I watched her.”
“But—wait,” Phoebe said, disoriented. “She was—I mean, that stuff you told me before, was it true or not?”
“What I …”
“You know. The Red Army? The bank robberies?”
“Yeah,” Wolf said. “All that was true.”
Phoebe felt relief. She wanted things to be true. “And she came to Munich, like you said?”
“She did.”
Phoebe waited for him to continue. “And then she left?” she asked timidly.
Wolf lifted his head. “Something happened in Berlin that I didn’t tell you,” he said, the words coming slowly. “Something bad.”
Phoebe absorbed it. “Someone got hurt,” she said instinctively. Then a dreadful intimation overcame her. “Someone died?”
Wolf just watched her.
“Who?” Phoebe said. “Someone from the bank robberies?”
“No, after,” Wolf said. “After the Red Army dumped her. There were these other groups, and she joined in with one of them. June Second Movement, it was called.”
“And they …”
“They set a bomb,” he said. “At the Chamber Court. Faith I guess carried it inside, in a picnic basket. She put it in a trash can in the basement; it went off at night. They thought no one would be around, but a guy was, a janitor.”
“And he died?”
“Yeah,” Wolf said. “Head injuries.”
Phoebe shook her head. She felt horror, not so much at the death itself, which seemed purely abstract, but at the smallest inkling of what horror her sister would feel, having been responsible. “Faith must’ve freaked …” she said.
“You can’t imagine,” Wolf said. “The papers told everything about the guy’s life, how he was thirty-two, four kids, working the night shift and going part-time to the university.