by James Reston
When he left her that last night, his mind had drifted, like a good German, to questions of soul and spirit. He admired her strength, her resilience … and also her suffering. In the Nietzsche that always lay close at hand on his bedside table, he had read that suffering did not make a person better, only more profound. Perhaps that was her path forward, not to the good life, not to happiness, certainly, but to an affirmation of life over death and guilt. He believed in the power of forgetfulness, for her and for himself. It was a way to deal with bad judgments and bad decisions. Karima would have to find her own way now, as would he.
He also thought about the impact she had had on him. His entire career had been spent in the company of criminals and, more recently, terrorists like Sami Haddad. It had given him a sense of superiority. He strove for a kind of private, personal nobility even as he wallowed in the swamp of evil. To disperse the odor of the riffraff, he read Goethe and listened to Beethoven and tried to appreciate Bizet’s operas because Nietzsche had said they were brilliant. When his superiors berated him for being condescending to his staff, and when he felt awkward in the presence of women, he convinced himself that exceptional men always found it difficult to connect with ordinary people because they were different and found familiarity to be tasteless.
But Karima Ilgun? He almost felt humble around her at the end. She had gazed deeply into the abyss and had not flinched when the abyss stared back at her. Her situation was beyond good and evil. She longed for a resolution, but there was none to be found, nothing either he or Haddad could present to her in a neat and tidy bow. As Recht let the speeches of his soon-to-be former colleagues and associates wash over him, as speakers lingered on one or another crisis he had solved (or failed to solve), crimes of history committed by the malignantly evil or credulous and misguided, he thought of Karima, somewhere, trying to start a clean new life in an unknown place, and remembered again his Nietzsche.
When he got home after the ceremony, his letter to her was in his mailbox. It had been returned unopened. On the front were the words: UNBEKANNT VERZOGEN … moved away to an unknown place. Yes, he thought, as he turned it over several times, unbekannt verzogen. He knew the feeling.
One has to be strong to forget.