Elaine said as much, actually—in fact, she said as much when I was twenty-three, in the third year of the war. I try to think back on Elaine Paxton at that time (I believe it had just occurred to me, bright lad, that her name was probably not Geraldine) because I want to remember how she looked, how she was different; the truth is, it’s difficult. It is just too continuous. I’ve seen her too many times.
I wonder if her hair was silver. It can’t have been silver all this time, but I can’t remember it any other color.
“The paradox of intelligence work, Leslie,” she said to me once in a car when we were reviewing a potential target—a Belgian office for munitions research—“is that everyone predisposed to be duplicitous, be creatively dramatic, have a rapid change of heart and come drastically over to your side, is that they are also predisposed to do all those things when you don’t want them to. There’s nothing worse than well-suited spies. I wish we could affix them in place with glue.”
I must’ve been in no mood for wit: “Are you concerned I’ll go over to the other side, ma’am?”
“You? No, you aren’t a Nazi. You’re no monster. That’s why we approached you.”
It was hard for me to conceive of the point of this abstract discussion. I remember what was going by outside the window: a dirt road alongside our paved one, where rural women worked and endeavored not to look up. “Isn’t this a bit immaterial, then?”
Elaine always sits with composure in cars, like she doesn’t notice that they are moving. I used to think that this was a skill, but lately I believe it’s just that she’s short. “I mean after all of this. These are fairly dire circumstances, and we’ve recruited rather than hired or been approached—that’s selected for people of some integrity. But it will be very different after.”
I must have looked at her, though I don’t recall what I saw. I either said or thought, with bitter disbelief: you’re assuming there’s going to be an after?
But honestly, I do believe she affixed me quite thoroughly for some time, or at least rid me of any double agent tendencies. Maybe it was that she’d approached me, rather than been approached: they tell that to children in case they become lost, you know—talk to the adults you choose, not who try to help you. In fact, I never became a Communist, received a better offer, fell in love with a beautiful Russian, became resentful, or grew bored. By that score, Elaine Paxton, Morrigan, did Queen and country right by recruiting Leslie Kincaid, Bullfinch. He served them gladly and well.
I said before also that we all like to be chosen. I’ve had the fortune of being chosen twice, and it’s the second that I imagine you are finding more relevant and more concerning—but let’s assign credit where it’s due. The first person to select me, inexorably, to save the world was Elaine Paxton nee Goddard. The last dreadnought in commission. They should give her a knighthood. They should have called her Gawain or Lancelot—or Bedivere. Loyal, incorruptible, changeless. I do not know how many years of service she’s had to witness these betrayals in, but I know, unshakably, that none of them were hers. I think a part of me hoped that one would be—I know I hoped her mask would be one to lift, on the other side of things, on my way back to my appointment in Vienna. But she—in relief, in sorrow—is exactly what she appears to be: I want to imagine that she’d have been by the young Queen’s deathbed someday, advising some last heartless course of jingoism. I can’t really imagine an England without her.
And really, I think that’s her undoing—imagination. Elaine’s no fool. But whatever she’s suspected of me, I don’t think she has ever been able to imagine the truth, or that her heart is big enough to contain everything I’ve been given to carry. I think she lacks a certain capacity for belief.
One more Elaine anecdote—the year after that, I hadn’t seen her in a while, wondered if I ever would again. She seemed too important to concern herself with me. (I am her steadiest agent, her protegé. Her most constant star.) I was under-supported and had to leave someone behind; then I tried to liaison and found my Resistance cell had melted like candle wax, off to Dachau and Ravensbrück. I was sick with fear and waited for them to come for me too. I had nowhere to go, and knew running would incriminate me. Mostly I sketched my landlord’s dog—I tried watercolors but something was off with me, I was unsteady and my washes too dark.
Every day I had alive was a day that the dead and dying had not betrayed me. I think about that sometimes, when I like to repeat fatuous truisms about spies and liars. I think of Luc and Noemie Boissel and five other people I’d barely known.
“I want an L-pill,” I said to Elaine when she finally came for me.
She’d come with a driver and a “husband”—lumpy men in overcoats. It was, at least, reassuring. “Those are less useful than you would think,” she said, in the middle of her last check of my lodgings.
“The Boissels never turned on me. I don’t want to turn on anyone either.”
“Very well,” she said, and in the car she gave me a tin: I didn’t think to be startled that she had one on her. “But no one is going to put it inside of your tooth. Pretend it’s a mint. Not too well.”
I dedicate this book, Appointment in Vienna, to Elaine Goddard Paxton, upon whom the sun never sets.
I dedicate my Great Work, the Magnum Opus, to Luc and Noemie Boissel. It will make no difference to them, decades too late. They’re beyond the reach of the dawn; I do not think I could even sketch them from memory. I didn’t commit their faces to it at the time. I’d thought I would have more opportunities.
* * *
Maugham’s unfortunate fellow sees Death in Baghdad and hastens to Samarra to meet him. Death is no less nonplussed—I was astonished to see him in Baghdad, he says, for I had an appointment with him tonight in Samarra.
Death clears his throat. Death touches him on the shoulder. Death checks his calendar, conscious of ever-hurrying onward himself; Death’s time is boundless, yet pressed somehow into an infinite number of urgent shapes. Where is Death going? Only to meet destiny in every place himself. Can he call it his own destiny, too? In Samarra he makes it just in time to see the startled face of the man running from him; in the marketplace he passes his hand through his shoulder. The man understands, suddenly. He turns back to the road. He must go back to traveling, or he too will be late.
* * *
Grytviken is a whaling station in the Sandwich Islands near the Antarctic. It’s one of the southernmost places a person can visit, and in 1950 I pitched it to National Geographic magazine in Washington DC as the substance of a profile. So I traveled there as cargo on a queasy whaler to explore the research station and photograph the Aurora Australis, and make a rendezvous.
I am including these pictures because I believe they are my most arresting work that I did not destroy. Like many beautiful photographs, they were somewhat a matter of being in the correct place, and largely of choosing the correct film and exposure.
Look at the green tracks of the valkyries, May. Imagine the darkroom I made of the lavatory where I was staying, where I labored and the Norwegians looked at me with pitying eyes.
* * *
In Vienna fourteen months before, I’d snapped a much more impulsive photograph. The lights at the opera were no less dizzy. I could’ve believed them the work of the gods too. That was the work of a different man: one without direction. Here’s the trouble with photography—it’s still. You don’t see what goes into setting it up, it’s true, but you’re also tricked into believing that it’s unobtrusive, that nothing happens after you capture the image and disturb the universe.
A gentleman was about to speak to me at the opera. I knew he was there, but I was paying him no mind until he touched my elbow. So forward!—I thought, amused, silly and vain—and I addressed him.
We spoke outside on the tiled veranda. “Do you have an interest in the future, Leslie?” he said.
“Does it matter?” He’d brought me to candor—I was studying his face. “It’ll be realized whether or not I take an in
terest, does it not? One way or another.”
“Not precisely. Time passes, whether or not you take an interest.” He took my hand like an earnest suitor, mulling over his own words; I didn’t think to prevent him. “But a future has to have witnesses in order to experience it. It doesn’t meaningfully exist without human eyes. This time will pass away, that’s true, with or without intervention. But there’s no guarantee that another will come.”
I must not have been fully serious. Fully comprehending—“Are we talking about the Age of the Atom? If so, between you and me and whoever’s listening, I will say that I don’t think the bomb will put an end to future time. To America and the Soviets and you and me, possibly, and quality of life as we know it. But there are so damned many of us running around.” Was I holding a glass? Champagne or rosé? How did I gesture, in my throes? “Mankind, I mean. Humans. There will always be somebody around to have a miserable time of it. Well, maybe not always. But it’ll be a while.”
I suppose here I was expecting some doomsday notions, or whatever the Russians—it had to be the Russians—had dreamed up and sent me—
He leaned in, fearless as a partner in a waltz. He wasn’t wrong: no one was looking at us.
“I’m not talking about bombs,” he said. “I mean better lives. I mean a better world for people to live. Aren’t you weary, Leslie, of spending your time trying to fight the horror? Has it ever worked?”
Ah, I wish I could record a startled and reverent silence here. Unfortunately, I always had something then. “You are getting damned seductive over in the KGB,” is what I said.
“The Communist experiment has always been reliant on educating virtue into human character,” said he, pushing his fingers through the spaces in mine: it felt idle, somehow, a courteous afterthought. Just partnering me for one dance. “The American one, too. Leslie, you can’t possibly imagine I would try to evangelize you on the premise that people, at large, will change? For the better, no less?”
* * *
After I finished my nighttime photography in Grytviken, I packed up my tripod and went to develop the film. I like my time in the darkroom. I put on a record, this time, to drown out the Vera Lynn from the downstairs—I can’t abide Vera Lynn, can’t hear her promises without being wrung out like a rag. Two kinds of veterans, I suppose. I put on The Andrews Sisters. Then after that, I went out after midnight to sit on the hill—it’s mostly hill, in Grytviken. The southern lights are better with your own two eyes; some things are.
He sat next to me. The cap he wore reminded me that he had to wear a costume, like the rest of us: I had fanciful thoughts, then, imagining him impersonating a whaler. Working one of those iron ships. (Nothing so daring. He was a scientist and had attained a research post, I learned: his name was public record. And I mean he was a scientist—that was his post. He’s not like us. If anything he has to come up to the surface to be seen.)
“I went to Kraków,” I said. “I murdered Sylvia Leigh. Or as good as.”
“I saw what you published. It’s a beautiful shot, the children. What did you find there?”
“Rubble.” It must have been cold. “And swarming greed. And revision—already. It isn’t going to get better, just after knocking everything down.”
“Not without intervention,” he agreed, quietly.
We sat. The green tinged the water, and the hair on my arms between jumper and glove.
“I hope you aren’t delusional,” I said.
He smiled; I could hear the remnant in his voice after he waited to reply. “If you were me, Leslie, what would you want before I granted you the revelation? Or think of it this way: what have you left to ask from me?”
The rocks were rough underneath us. After all this time I don’t think I’ve gotten any thicker-skinned.
“An L-pill.” I think I pushed the question out of my voice—not an L-Pill?, hopeful, to the schoolmaster.
He patted me between the shoulders. This time it was avuncular.
“I don’t need you to die,” he said.
“I don’t care if I do.”
“I know.” He put his hand over my hand. “When we sacrifice, we make no offering to ourselves. And we make no offering to God, either. Everything we do, we do for the living. I know you.”
Everyone likes to be chosen, or should. In truth I felt silly—all my pretenses gone. The end of a play-chase, and no idea why I’d been running. “You must remain alive to do everything you need to do,” he said. “What I need from you is your loyalty. More than an oath. You will never betray me in word or deed. It is not a command—it is a description.” His voice was close, his tone remote. “I will not force you to take it. But know that I can settle for nothing less in you.”
I don’t know if it was a kindness, that he brought me to a beautiful and strange place to do this to me—the exact sort of place an artist would like to be transformed. Or perhaps I flatter myself. Or perhaps I do the hand of fate a disservice, bringing Death and the traveler together on their obverse errands. He took my arm and led me to the water, where the world of lights was reflected. I know it was no choice. I know he did not force me. I know, May, that we were each on our course, and he was gifted to know where I would walk.
* * *
So there you have it, May. I lead a matryoshka life: an artist and journalist on the shell, within him a spy, and within him, something else entirely. But to be honest—to—be—honest—there are some times when I think the shell must have been the real one. Not something painted on, but something hollowed out. If nothing else, he takes the least thought. When I spent time with you and Ned (is he really gone? How is it always something like pneumonia, or flu?) and our smart set, our boys and girls and nellies and sympathizers and manic-depressives of the galleries and the papers, I never had to think of how. I felt so heavy with habit. I was comfortable.
I think in another time, I would have reviewed film—set myself to thinking about what Ingmar Bergman was doing, always with the vague dissatisfaction that I had a work within me too that, next year, I would realize.
Well, it turns out that I do, don’t I?
I . . . I was always late to the “salons” you hosted. Fashionably. You know, those glorified parties—I hear Astrid’s were glorified orgies, but not of the sort I’d like. Your salons, there were always thirteen or fourteen of you arrayed on chairs or cushions, depending which venue you’d acquired, and you sat smoking with drinks in your hands, all facing one another. There was always a cloud of smoke and some light through it, which flattered everyone’s hair and jewelry. Together you toasted your health as you depleted it, and damned the bastards and the philistines: to next year, next year in Jerusalem where there’d be funding for more than just propaganda and BBC hagiography, next year where they produced the films of brilliant women, next year, next year, next year where we made it, every single one. I would linger to listen to your toasts and Sarah’s and Art’s and Erich’s when he mimicked you.
You’d see me shortly—Leslie! Are you ever punctual?—but there’s some added-up time of me in doorways, waiting for you to notice. I wonder if there’s anything you’ve ever waited for me to notice. Did I?
Next year, May. I can promise you next year. Maybe not for us. But I come bearing next year: where we make it, every single one.
* * *
I’ve wondered often—is the oath I took real? Is it binding? I have seen stranger wonders since—and we have stranger ones yet in store, when we take what we must from this world and burn it in that offering to the living. On the first Armistice Day they had the ludicrous idea of a War to End All Wars. Call this the sacrifice to end all sacrifices. I’ve seen the spheres that move above us and below; I know we exist on a fragile plane of a shape of catastrophic complexity. Believe me, May, I have learned not to be arrogant and skeptical. Skepticism is an easy refuge. It is more often true than not, which almost seems like “true.” You will see things you cannot imagine—there is no avoiding that, really. That’s just the a
dvance of time.
But the oath is the thing I doubt. The reason I doubt it is that I’ve never had reason to test it. I have never tried to betray the Great Work. I have never opened my mouth with the aim of telling anyone the truth of what I do. Perhaps that’s evidence of the oath, or evidence that it never needed to exist. That is why I am interested in our book, May, in Appointment in Vienna—because whatever I say or don’t say here, I have no control over it. It would not exist, and if it did, I’d have no hand in its making.
I believe that is the only course left to me, in the way of confession.
In closing, I have no editorial advisement on the contents of the text, for the most part. One thing I would like for you to include at some point—I’m not choosy about where—is a reproduction of one of my sketches. This is a retrospective of my photography, yes, I do know, but I think you would be remiss not to acknowledge that I was a representational visual artist as well, don’t you think? I’ve chosen a self-portrait in charcoal from my time at university when I was terribly young, before any design had me in it apart from my own.
You can see it is my work because I have rendered myself a little unattractive. I’ll have you know I was a handsome boy, but somehow false humility had already got under my skin and I’d thought I should be a little ironic. Well, there you have it—turned three-quarters, crosshatched, with the slightest devilish smile on my crudely formed lips. The joke is all on me: there’s no one left to see the irony, no applause for the deprecation. My voice, eighteen, is gone. You can attach it to the biographical material.
Gabriel Murray Page 3