by Ward Just
It was eight in the morning when she heard the door open and someone enter. She held her breath. She listened carefully for—something, a gasp, a cry of surprise, a shout. She heard a grunt, heavy footsteps, and silence. Then she heard an exclamation in German. Her father opened the door and looked in. He was so big, he filled the door. He did not greet her in any way, only looked at her incuriously, as an official might. She sat up in bed, rubbing her eyes. She had been in a deep dreamless sleep. She said, “Papa.” He did not reply, but closed the door firmly. She heard him moving around, muttering to himself in German. Five minutes later he opened the door again and told her to collect her things, what things she had, that they would leave immediately. When she emerged from the room with her bag, a sheet covered the man on the couch. Her father was standing by the door, looking at his watch. He said that Jerzy was dead. He had killed himself.
And you heard nothing, he said.
She did not know if it was a question or a statement. She shook her head. No, Papa.
Nothing in the night.
I was asleep, Papa.
Remember that you were, darling.
What?
Asleep, all night long. That you heard nothing. Saw nothing.
Yes, of course, Papa.
Did you like Jerzy, darling?
No, Papa.
Yes, I understand. Did you quarrel?
No, Papa.
The door to the apartment was always locked?
Yes, Papa.
And there were no visitors?
She looked at him closely, wondering what it was that he wanted her to say. She tried to read his face as she read the time. But he frightened her so. She began to tremble, looking at his eyes, and his tremendously dark brows. Her mind was racing, her worlds colliding. She said at last, Yes, Papa. One visitor.
He smiled broadly. And when was that, darling? Was that yesterday, in the afternoon?
Yes, Papa.
Did you see his face?
She shook her head vehemently. No, Papa.
He had a car in the street outside. They drove to another apartment in the city. The remainder of the day was a blur to her. Officials came and went. There seemed to be a great consternation. Her father had told her to sit in the kitchen, away from the commotion, and be very quiet. Do not speak unless you are spoken to, he said. Tell them what you told me, he said sternly. Two men had interrogated her, but as their questions were confused her answers were also confused. When she did not understand the question, she said nothing. They did not appear to have the straight of it. At the end of the day, she and her father were driven to the railroad station in an official car. She sat in the back seat, her father in the front with the driver, an older man whom he seemed to know. They chatted all the way to the railroad station. After a short trip by train they were transferred to another car, and driven to an airport, through a gate at the far end of the field, and directly to the plane. Once inside, she fell asleep and when she woke up and asked where they were, her father said, “Paris.”
In Paris they had a large apartment and a housekeeper, who accompanied her every day to the school. The streets were colorful and animated, not at all like the streets of the other city. Her father said that she would attend a special school and that if she was attentive she would do well. She took him at his word, listening carefully and rarely speaking. Every few months there would be an examination. Sometimes she did well, sometimes badly, it depended on her frame of mind, and the nature of the examination. She knew that it was not wise to disclose everything, so she withheld knowledge as a matter of course. She believed all the students did; they all knew more than they said. She had a few friends at the school, girls she’d play cards with, and talk to when no one was watching. The school was run by nuns, large women for the most part, austere and peculiar in their black and white costumes. Each morning and each evening there would be a prayer. Promptly at five P.M. they would be released; she would be met at the gate by the housekeeper, and they would walk home to dinner. Her father was often gone on business, sometimes for a month or more. He seemed very prosperous and sure of himself, and she never lost her fear of him. She remembered him beating her mother. She would never forget the thick hand pressing her temple, forcing her to watch, and her mother’s terrified, stoic acceptance.
There was all that to account for.
Dead men on furlough, he said again.
She looked at him.
A phrase of Lenin’s, he said. When young revolutionaries become old revolutionaries.
She smiled, nodding. Suddenly she stood on tiptoe and kissed him, a lingering kiss. They stood a moment in the shadows, kissing. He did not seem passionate, his thoughts were elsewhere. Gert knew this, she could taste it, taste his distance; she felt him recede. She was now absolutely certain that he would never hurt her. She knew also that she was protecting him, drawing him closer to her, drawing him inside. That was where they would both be safe, where the darkness was absolute. His words—but what did they mean, beyond that they said? She spoke his name. But he was still waiting, so solemn, a motionless American. She could not even feel his breathing. She looked at him helplessly.
He held her at arm’s length.
She said, Do you want to see the apartment?
He said, This is where you live with your father?
Yes, she said.
He said, I have to go away for a while. Not long. When I return, I’ll tell you why my father is afraid of me. And then, perhaps you can confess, too.
She said again, Do you want to see the apartment?
It was the most she had ever said in one breath. She moved away, across the cobblestones of the courtyard. She looked up; the apartment was dark. She waited a moment, and when she turned back—in one motion, her arms at her sides, a model’s slow pivot—he was gone, as she knew absolutely he would be. As she knew absolutely that when he returned to Paris, he would come to see her, as he had promised, and explain about his American father.
Two weeks later they were alone in her bedroom, the windows thrown open to the drowsy summer. Gray light: it was raining, a welcome sprinkle, muffling the morning sounds from the rue de Sevres. Someone was baking bread, the sweet smell of bread in the room, too, along with the rain. She watched him sleep, dozing a little herself, warm and content in the big familiar bedroom with its single poster: one of Picasso’s blue women. He lay on his back, his hands folded on his chest like a pharaoh, his mouth slightly parted as if he were preparing to speak. She lay beside him, her eyes half closed. She noticed stubble on his chin where it rested against the sheet. She touched his skin with her fingernail. He did not stir. They had talked through the night: talked, made love, talked, made love again, more talk, more love, fierce talk, fierce love. He was a fierce lover, though never rough or egotistical as she imagined men to be. She knew there was brutality in him, and recklessness; sooner or later it would show itself. She did not see him clearly yet. His soft humorous voice mesmerized her, his voice soft even when describing with ferocity. Now she was trying to find room for the information he had given her. She was trying to surmise the look of things behind his words; words alone were never enough and always deceptive, a smoke screen of sound. She believed her eyes. She wanted above all to see, to go beneath the surface as Picasso had done. So she tried to imagine America, his America, its shape and the life it accommodated. America was as vast as the Soviet Union, and as exotic to her as Japan or South Africa or Argentina. She wanted to know what it was that inspired such passion. She was a European, and had never heard America described at first hand by a member of the family, an intimate familiar with its rules and geography, its legends, its civilization—not a destination after all, but a journey. A civilization was never finished, or stable, or defined finally; it was always growing and in flux. America had forever been a mysterious country, widely feared and hated, but also a riddle, unpredictable, fathomless, yet magnetic. And ludicrous; people laughed at America, its oafishness and low taste, and its p
retension.
In the night when she had cried out, her emotions loose and volcanic, he had embraced her, his arms like great muscled wings; he had crushed her to him in the Paris darkness. They were alone in the world. Breathless in his embrace, she had expected torment. He had lifted her off the bed and she was free of gravity at last, floating with him, emancipated from the earth. They were free, beyond restraint or reach of any authority. She was ecstatic, knowing she would never leave him. Then when he began to speak again, his mouth close against her ear, his breath hot, she imagined an hourglass turned upside down, grains tumbling from the bell to collect at the bottom of the glass to be read, each grain, like tea leaves; she saw the future racing toward her. She had listened, rapturous, dreamy, seldom interrupting, attentive in her fashion—seeing a tale, a narrative, Wolf’s song.
Oh, a narrow, careless, unhappy country. Unhappy with itself, unhappy with what it had wrought. Unhappy with its civilization: broken promises, contracts not honored, a drawer full of bad debts. Negative vibrations, a pervasive melancholy among the glitter. In America, unhappiness was not a virtue, it sapped the strength of the people. Like prairie topsoil, optimism was a national resource. Heartbreak and nightmare. America talks in its sleep, he said, a feverish voice from the back country, no longer a frontier. No longer potent. No longer young. No longer new. From the chorus, a growl of complaint and helpless outrage. In the nightmares were ayatollahs, redheaded strangers, love gone wrong, unfaithful women, erratic men, and terror everywhere, a breakdown not of law but of order. America’s sleep-talk, obsessed with legend and myth; but the grammar was elusive. Americans were not reluctant to tamper with their own history, trying to make things nice, and that was why living in America was an adventure—a world of science fiction, a lake one day was a forest the next and a desert the day after. And no one was in charge. America reinvented itself each day, why couldn’t the world do likewise?
That was why the present situation was so laughable. The people were distressed with the holy men in Iran. There was an atmosphere approaching war fever. Americans did not understand that acts had consequences; ignoring that rule had allowed them to sleep easily in the twentieth century. Bad news? Keep it out of the paper. Forget it! Americans did not believe in atonement, an hour of reflection. So there was outrage and astonishment over the capture and internment of the diplomats and spies (there was no difference between them in any case) employed by the embassy in Teheran. Uncivilized barbaric behavior, Khomeini a sixteenth-century mystic, an Islamic Cotton Mather, an evil, evil man—an antique. However, there was no astonishment from anyone who had read the Koran and took it seriously, not as poetry but as history and prediction: as an article of faith, like the Bill of Rights. To anyone who knew the history of Iran under the puppet shah the taking of prisoners of war was logical and necessary, inevitable, symmetrical, fulfilling the requirements of history, meaning revenge. That was the reality “on the ground,” as the ambassador was fond of saying; that there could be more than one reality in the world always came as a surprise to Americans, and an insult that the local reality was always the controlling reality.
His own father was obsessed with the captivity, being a—commissar in the American diplomatic service, an ambassador. It was his life. It was his endre life, and anyone who knew him knew that; he believed in diplomatic immunity, diplomats as a separate class of citizen, like priests or army officers. So the seizure of the embassy was an unspeakable breach of courtesy, an appalling turn of the screw, and could not be permitted to go unpunished. But he was impotent, they all were; they did not even have the intelligence to acknowledge a guilty conscience, meaning: responsibility for the fate of the Iranian people. Now they did not know what to do. They organized a rescue mission, and that failed; they organized a boycott, and that failed. The world they made was coming apart, piece by piece. Hard for a European to understand, beyond the understandable, even laudable Schadenfreude. But the distress of Americans was palpable, architects watching the house collapse of its own weight, and this was a house that was supposed to last a century! This house, made with the finest American materials, constructed by America’s most adroit and subtle craftsmen, turning to dust. Cuba came apart, Indochina came apart, and now Iran and the Gulf. What would be next in the Northern Hemisphere? Germany? Wasn’t it only a matter of time before the Germans began to think again, and the nation slowly move its shoulders, uncomfortable in the American jacket. Ostpolitik, Deutschpolitik. Germany had a right to control its own affairs. Germany had a right—no, a duty—to sit at the head table, as the strongest power in Europe. Germany had done its penance, had reconciled its past, and the new generation insisted on charting its own future, having suffered long enough for the sins of the fathers. Ja?
He had looked at her and smiled. “Boom,” he said.
“Boom,” she replied.
The Koran was not far removed from the Old Testament, in its definition of law and order. An eye for an eye. Quite specific, and no provision for an appeal. Perhaps Americans could be brought to understand the principle, Americans who enjoyed the exercise of power, who so loved their ostentatious killing machines, weapons of war utilizing the latest technologies, each new advance in the state of the art further removing the killer from the victim. Was it that Americans did not like to look their enemy in the eye? But—he smiled again, and she could see his words looping and floating, hesitating, finally homing in—concealed weapons were effective also, a bomb that could fit into your overcoat pocket, a handgun scarcely larger than a deck of cards. All that remained was to select the target, and there were so many, human beings, installations. Random targets. That is, targets selected at random. Not the obvious targets, not men of notoriety, but men who were cogs in the machine. Men without whom the machine would founder, the kind of men who would routinely look over their shoulder, knowing that there was always a possibility, because naturally they were part of it. They were the sort of men who were routinely imprisoned in the client states, Iran, Korea, the Philippines, Israel.
It would set them back, he said.
He had kissed her tenderly in the darkness, and disclosed that his father had killed a man, an African, while on diplomatic service in Africa. He did not know the name of the African, whether the African had a family, what the African believed in, or if he believed in anything; but he had shot him dead. They gave him a medal for it. He was commended by the attorney general. When I asked him about it—What really happened, Ambassador? Was it necessary to kill him?—he refused to talk. Refused to explain or justify. My impression was that he shot him as easily as he lied for his government, his employer for a quarter of a century. Or as he lied to me. Silence, also, is a lie.
She said, Yes.
He said, The ambassador was without remorse.
She had nodded in the darkness, imagining the dead African; the African with no name and no history, no grave and no headstone, murdered by an American in Africa. She wanted to know if his father had ever dared to hurt him, if he had ever raised his fist or pointed a weapon at him. But she did not know how to ask. She assumed the answer was yes. She was thinking of the future now, the two of them together in Europe. They would be happy in Europe, with its many national boundaries; it was a natural hiding place. In Europe, they could disappear; millions of people had disappeared in Europe. And there were many targets, human beings, installations of an official nature; they could search for the targets together as they had the afternoon they had walked near the Louvre. Of course she would have to think up an excuse for her father, in order to leave the apartment. He would want some explanation, it would not matter what it was. She wondered where they would go, perhaps back to Germany. There were many places to live anonymously in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. They would follow his plan. And they would protect each other, that was the main thing. She thought of the money she had saved, the neat stacks of bills in the hatbox under her bed. It had never occurred to her to spend it, and now she was happy that she hadn’t. It
would be wonderful for them to have transportation of their own, perhaps a little red car. Then they could go anywhere.
Wolf was silent and his breathing was labored. A vein pulsed in his forehead.
She cradled his head in her lap. Outside it was gray, the morning so sudden. She wanted to make love again. She looked at him, his face drawn in the gray light. He was a handsome boy, his eyes closed now, his lips a thin hard line. She wondered what he was thinking. Was he thinking of her? She imagined herself in his thoughts. She imagined herself behind his forehead, being the blood rushing though his vein. Behind his forehead was a comfortable room, a pretty sunlit room with flowers, a place to live anonymously. She could see through his eyes; see, and not be seen. If he was thinking about her, what did he see? She kissed him on his forehead and his eyelids fluttered.
He whispered, The ambassador used to take me to the Department on Saturdays, when we lived in Washington and he was a deputy assistant to the deputy assistant, something like that. I was very small. He went to the office to read the cable traffic. To discover who’s screwing up and where, he said. The office was quiet and I wondered whether the world stopped on weekends to give American diplomats a rest. There were always telephone calls to be made. At the touch of a button the ambassador could talk to other bureaus in the building, or with embassies abroad. He liked being in the office with the telephone and its buttons, and the switchboard that could link up—anywhere. And he had a picture on the wall, Lincoln. He took it with him wherever he went; it always hung on a wall close by. The ambassador’s great hero, Lincoln. Lincoln and his mercantile war. Lincoln and his eman-ci-pa-tion proc-la-ma-tion. What a fucking fraud. Worse than Bonaparte.