The big one smiled and nodded. “Stuart.”
“Brent,” said the puffy-faced one.
They all seemed to be trying not to look at the old man, whose gaze settled intensely on each of them in turn, and then seemed to retrace itself.
“This is my grandfather,” Hans Schmidt said to them.
Smalley was in a blue pin-striped suit and therefore looked both out of place and as though he should be in charge. He stepped forward and shook hands. “It’s quite an honor to meet you, sir.”
“Ich danke ihnen demütig.”
“My grandfather thanks you, humbly,” Hans said.
“Ja,” said the old man. “Zorry. Humble.”
Then they all stood quite still, as if listening for something. The light changed slightly at the window.
“Mein Englisch—” Schmidt stopped, shook his head, the smallest side-to-side motion. “My Englisch, how you zay, not ze best.”
“That’s just fine.” Smalley sat down next to him on the divan, hands folded between his slightly spread knees. “My father was in Vietnam. He was wounded there.”
The old man nodded, staring at him, but said nothing.
“I almost went to Iraq.”
There was another pause. Then Smalley hurried to explain. “I mean I thought of volunteering to go over there and report on it all.”
“Oh, Freiwillige,” said Eugene Schmidt, smiling, trying a joke: “Zorry. Volunteer. Unheard in za army I served.”
“No, sure.” Smalley laughed nervously. “I guess not.” He cleared his throat. “I understand you were a librarian?”
Schmidt looked at him. “I vas library ztudent.”
“What was that like? You know, when the—uh—when Hitler came to power.”
“I vas twelve years old.”
“Oh.”
“Vee did not sink of politics.”
“No. But later—I mean, you must’ve been in the—uh—youth program?”
“I vas schoolboy.”
There was a brief pause. Schmidt had another sip of coffee, which was cold now.
“And you fought in Russia,” Smalley went on.
“Ja. Before.”
“What was that like for you?”
Schmidt wrapped his skinny arms around himself. “Cold.”
“I bet.” It seemed clear from Smalley’s tone that he was not terribly happy with the answers he was getting but felt chary of pressing. “I’m going to be asking you about some of that, if you don’t mind. When we do my part of the interview.”
“What could it matter now?” Schmidt asked him, smiling.
“People are gonna want to know what it was like.” There was the slightest shrug of Smalley’s shoulders.
Kaye had begun working on tying the drapes back for more light. The others were putting together the metal frame from which they would hang the extra lights they needed. She kept muttering orders at them. “We’re going to need floods, and they’re going to have to be higher.”
“Yep,” said Stuart.
They were all three working together. The one named Stuart looked through the camera at Eugene Schmidt.
“Might have to remove the glasses. The glare.”
“Grandfather, can you take your glasses off?”
The old man removed them and put them on the table.
“Better,” said Stuart.
“This must be so wonderful and strange for you,” Smalley said. “To see this person you saved after all this time. So many years.”
“Ja,” Schmidt answered unsteadily, not returning his gaze, feeling nothing but a sudden welling up of avoidance. Years, yes. But always it’s now. He wanted to say to the man that everything is now, everything only one vast now. And no one understood it. That even last night, half asleep in this hotel, waking to see his own coat draped over the end of the bed and thinking it to be his friend Marcus, about whom he had been dreaming, bending to take something—Marcus from forty-five years ago, and he’d had an argument with him, 1971, and only later, when they were no longer speaking, did he come up with what he should have said to him. A remark that would’ve settled him. And in the half dark of the July morning, Marcus, who had been dead thirty years, was present, enough for Eugene Schmidt to feel the chagrin all over again of not having had the nimbleness of mind to say it. What a triumph it would have been to say it.
This gathering seemed suddenly too early. It was all too early. Everything. He clasped his skeletal hands with their black patches between the bones and watched the others in the room. He had not been given time to acclimate himself. He saw his grandson talking to the woman, Kaye. Looking at her thin face, an insane thought came to him that she looked as though she possessed the brutal will to order young men to their deaths. Of course, that was preposterous. Probably a nice woman. Probably a nice Jewish woman, and he gazed at her, wanting to say plainly that the sickness was not with him and never had been. He was a boy studying library science who wept when they burned the books. He felt the need to ingratiate himself with her, soften what he might say because he did not like the severity of her features. And after all, who knew what he had ingested psychologically in that space of his life, that might still be with him? In the next instant he remembered again that it all was with him, all that he had seen and been. It was present. Contemporaneous, happening horrifically all at once. And this woman reminded him of someone. Feldwebel Myer. Sergeant Myer. With the chin like a steel wedge. He had not thought of Myer, or the shellfire in the cold, for such a very long time. Yet there it all was. There it was in its terrible withness. He could not believe it. And here were these people moving around in the bright room—with a weary, regretful old man nodding at them and pretending to listen—as if this for itself were important, were more than a punishing curiosity.
He shivered.
The knock at the door startled him. He watched his grandson go over to open it. Smalley was still sitting there next to him saying something about the present wars, repeating that he almost went to Iraq, as though it were necessary to emphasize the fact. It might have been an assignment he would have. His whole life, Smalley said, he wanted to be a newspaperman, and now here he was at the Post. He went on talking proudly of his work.
Schmidt kept nodding, having trouble concentrating for the tumult in his mind. The knock at the door had been room service, Hans announced. He held a tray with a bottle of orange juice and a glass on it. He set it down on the coffee table, then poured the glass full. In German, he said to his grandfather, “Five minutes, yes? More like half an hour.”
Schmidt replied, also in German. “I’m so thirsty.” He lifted the glass and took a long drink, then put it back on the tray.
Again, in German, he said, “Hans, for the love of God, please speak English.”
Hans answered in English. “Yes, sir.”
Smalley was discussing with Kaye how the filming would go. Everything was ready for the morning event, the initial meeting.
“I’m going to ask you both to talk about how this feels,” Kaye said to Eugene Schmidt. “That’s all right, isn’t it?”
“If za oza von vishes. Ja.”
“I understand you kept in touch and got to be friends.”
“Ja. Vell.”
“I can’t imagine what that must’ve been like. Both Catholic, too. Do you both still practice?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you?”
“Zumtimes, ja.”
“Will you talk about all that sort of thing with him?”
Schmidt gazed at her. He had the inescapable feeling of being patronized. He said, “If he vishes.”
“What do you wish for?” she asked.
He smiled, reaching for the orange juice again. But his hand shook, and he decided against it. “Peace,” he said, keeping the smile.
“Oh
, don’t we all,” she said. “Do you want some more of the juice?”
“Sank you, no.”
She stood and moved toward the window, and he folded his hands again. In the same moment he experienced the contradictory sense that maintaining his dignity was necessary, and that this was impossible anyway in the circumstance. How do you maintain dignity when your hands look like the hands of a corpse found after centuries in the ground?
Again, there was the knock at the door. This time it was Robert Marson and his son and two women. Eugene recognized the women as the ones he had seen arriving in the SUV earlier. They came in first—he had only caught a glimpse of Marson, a skinny figure behind them. The two women looked very much alike, though the one with the blond hair was older. They were very serious, as if being led into a courtroom. The camera and the equipment were a source of great interest to the younger one. Patrick Marson introduced her as Monica. She had thickly made-up eyes, with lashes that looked fake and were too dark. There was a tattoo on her neck, too, and Schmidt looked over at Stuart, to see if he had noticed it. How curious, still to be interested, in spite of everything. He looked at the other woman, the one with the wild blond hair. He saw her round, smiling, wide-eyed face, and said, “I’m ninety-five years old.”
She kept the smile. “I know, I’m Noreen.”
He could not find Marson, looking at this woman and now her brother, Patrick, who loomed over him, reaching to shake hands. “What an honor it is to meet you, sir. And thank you for the life of my father. For my life.”
Smalley said, “That’s what we need to capture in the film. Kaye, are you all getting this?”
“Stuart?” she said in the tone of a command.
“Filming, but I need levels. Nobody’s mic’d up. Jesus.”
Schmidt nodded at him, feeling the air grow thin. The room was so crowded and he could not see Marson.
And then he could. Marson seemed smaller, his shoulders narrow, sloped, his eyes two horizontal tight lines, his mouth indrawn, clearly toothless. He had a beak of a nose. Schmidt did not remember the nose, and maybe age had heightened its prominence on the face. There wasn’t a strand of hair on his head. When Marson was introduced to the young NPR lady who had the cruel green eyes, he had to bend his neck as if looking uphill, and he seemed suddenly shy. Brent had stepped close and was fumbling with the cloth of Schmidt’s shirt, excusing himself, pinning a little wired mic to the collar. Then he went over to Marson and did the same. The wire from the mic went into a small cigarette-pack-sized battery or transmitter.
The others now stood back, and Hans bent down to say something Schmidt couldn’t hear.
“Vas?”
“We’re starting in a minute.”
“Sound?” said Kaye. “We’re all set, right?”
“Everything’s ready to go,” Brent the sound man said.
“Camera?”
“Got it,” said Stuart. “Had it from the start.”
Marson walked slowly over. Everyone grew very still and quiet.
VI
Marson’s morning had begun with an old affliction—a recurring condition the doctors called corneal erosion. He had suffered with it intermittently for at least thirty years, and sometimes several years would go by without an attack. But it always returned. Perhaps this time it was the dehydrating ride in the jet from Memphis to Washington. But the truth was that neither he nor the doctors had ever really been able to discern a pattern or a cause. One doctor, not an ophthalmologist but a good general practitioner, attributed it to dryness, to having a fan blowing on you in the nights. But Marson never put a fan on, had always slept under blankets, even in the summer.
At any rate, in the predawn he woke from a busy dream of an airline cabin, two rows of seats crowded with weary passengers going off into the vanishing point, and immediately he felt the pain in his left eye. The condition did not endanger his sight or damage the tissue, but it was as if there were a small shard of glass under the lid. It hurt to move the eye, opening or closing it. Any slight motion of it, to either side, up or down, was excruciating. The only thing he could do was put some ointment in it and lie flat with eyes closed until the pain went away. Sometimes this took hours. His son snored in the next bed and made sudden gasping noises. Marson got up quietly and moved into the bathroom. The ointment was in his shaving kit.
Later, in bed again, he felt a pressure at the middle of his chest, a familiar and old sensation, having to do with the skein of muscle tissue on either side of his breastbone. He had strained it lifting his suitcase into the back of the car, in Memphis.
And still, of course, he thought of his heart. What else do you think about at this age in the nights, with your seventy-one-year-old son snoring in the bed next to you? The eye stung and watered; his chest hurt. He thought of Schmidt. Eugene Schmidt. He remembered the cold and the misery, the loneliness, even as you moved with others, even as you heard their voices, voices that you clung to though they drove you toward breaking down. Sounds grated on your nerves. Something singing amid the sprigs of pine where you walked, some small helplessly cheerful-sounding creature, and you wondered what could possibly live in this dead place, while you hoped to be able to kill it to stop its noise, and you went on, breathing gas and smoke and powder, and the memory-obliterating, sick-sweet, weighing-you-down stench of death.
“Bad,” he murmured, lying there in the hotel bed. “God. Help.” There was always the fear of breaking to pieces. He thought of the others, the dead, saw their faces colorless as cold water. This was what he had been afraid of, going into this situation where all of it could come rushing through the opening you made in memory. “Christ,” he whispered. He should not have come here.
“Dad?” Patrick was awake.
“I shouldn’t have done this,” Marson said.
“What is it?”
“Go back to sleep, Son.”
“You all right?”
“Fine. Christ. Go back to sleep.”
“Maybe we should’ve found a way to see them last night.”
Marson did not answer.
“But Schmidt had already gone to bed.”
“Bet he didn’t sleep,” Marson said.
“I’m sorry. I’ll shut up.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean anything by that.”
A moment later, he said, “This trip’s calling everything back. I bet it’s doing the same to him. In my thoughts I’m back there. Christ. I’m twenty-seven again and expecting to die any second, even in the hours of doing nothing but waiting. Twenty-seven. And I don’t want to go back. I never would’ve believed I had seventy-two years to go.”
“Well, seventy-two and counting.”
They were both quiet. Light was coming to the window, the one window.
“Twenty-seven,” Patrick said. “Was anybody ever that young?”
“We both were,” said Marson, “and only twenty-eight years between us. Think of that.”
“God.”
“Go on back to sleep,” Marson said.
Soon he heard the snoring. He lay there quietly, experiencing the pain in his eye, seeing again things he had kept down in some part of himself. Seeing Helen’s face, which had faded now so that it was closer to an idea than an image. How awful it was that a whole long lived life, with its pleasures and worries, its separate milestones, its incremental changes, and all the daily passages, could fall away under the weight of a single recollection. He was always trying to remember her face more clearly than he could.
Oh, girl.
The sting in his eye had begun to subside. The bed was uncomfortable. His back hurt. He drifted and saw himself get out of the bed and walk to the window to look out at the night streets, the avenues of his home city. But when he opened his eyes he was still in the bed and light was pouring into the room. The phone was ringing. He sat up with a start, feeling the hammering of his ow
n heart, and realized that his son had gone in to take a shower. A phone ringing in the middle of the night. But this was morning. The phone kept jangling. Picking up the receiver, he held it to his ear without speaking.
“Hello?” Noreen’s voice.
He breathed for a few seconds and said, “We just got up.”
“Why don’t you say ‘hello.’ You’re supposed to say ‘hello’ when you answer the phone.”
“Hello, Noreen,” he said.
They made breakfast arrangements. She went on about plans for the evening, speaking with that rapid assurance that people had mistaken for rudeness all her life. And there was no one more softhearted or generous. Wherever she went, from her girlhood through a long marriage and life in five different cities including Kyoto—her husband, Mike, had worked for the airline industry—she created a wide community of friends, and she never let any of them go. In terms of sensibility and temperament she was exactly as she had been when she was twelve years old. With her children she was like a funny friend. But she was strong, too, and could be stubborn. Marson saw Helen in her, and he admired her while also finding her a bit exhausting. She rattled on about how she and Monica would attend the concert and fireworks on the mall.
“Have you seen Schmidt yet?” she asked.
“Later this morning.”
“Any celebrities or news types?”
“We just got here ourselves, Noreen.”
“What room are you in?”
VII
When Patrick was through with the shower, he helped Marson get into it and run water over himself. Marson had a stall at home. You walked into it and walked out of it. Here, you had to step into a bathtub. The women arrived as Patrick was helping him dry off. He got into the robe provided by the hotel and Patrick opened the door.
Noreen looked tired and vaguely aggravated, while her daughter was calm, perhaps even a bit drowsy. She told Patrick that she loved the ride down to D.C.
“Great company,” Noreen said. “I might as well have been driving a hearse.”
“The sleep I had in that bumpy SUV was spotty, especially with Mother driving.”
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