“Well, actually — ” Emmett was tempted to tell him, yes, a little, and he hoped to learn more. He’d discovered that it was unusual, his fluency in Japanese, a rare talent in a young Canadian man, and he planned to build on that, maybe become fluent in Mandarin, to find a career in his seemingly exotic talents.
But now Norfield was going too fast to listen. He needed to tell. He was with his brother when Hong Kong fell. His brother was hurt. It was bad, but they were together. Then the Japs shipped his brother away, to Niigata, on the Sea of Japan. “I tell you this,” he said, pointing his cigarette at Emmett, “because maybe you holidayed there.”
Emmett looked at him blankly.
“Did you?” Norfield persisted.
“As a matter of fact — ” Emmett began. He had holidayed there.
“Forget it.”
Norfield’s brother died at Niigata. Emmett said, “I’m sorry.” Norfield waved his hand to say, Change the subject. But he himself came back to it. “It hit me,” he said. “All those deaths.” He shrugged. “That one really hit me.” He asked Emmett, “You have a brother?”
Emmett didn’t have a brother. Norfield put his arm around him. “I came back through Guam, and heard he’d died back in ’43. It hit me.”
“I know,” said Emmett.
“Deplorable.”
The word seemed funny and they laughed, their eyes on each other.
Norfield said, “The look on my mother’s face when I got off the train without him.”
At Canton, his first prison, Norfield had been forced to kneel on the floor of the cell and look at the wall. “The wall, all day, every day, staring at that wall. Not even allowed to scratch the fleas. A bad six months.” He inhaled almost a quarter-inch of his cigarette. Norfield’s jaw was clean and fine, his scent seemed to come from his throat.
“Your eyes are nerve endings,” Norfield said. “You become what you see. You get infected.”
Emmett understood. He began to feel that he wore Norfield’s face, a replacement of his features that would persist long after the effects of the pill had faded.
Book dust, but otherwise Norfield’s place looked impeccable, newspapers neatly stacked, five pens, a silver soup spoon that seemed out of place, four broken pencils, ten pennies in a row.
Except the spoon affected John Norfield’s nerves and so did the lint in his pocket; so did the little girl with a skipping rope he’d passed by that afternoon. The spoon may be put into a drawer, but he’d know it was there; it could be placed in alignment with the broken pencils but it would remain, the spoon, a stray article. For Norfield, since the war anyway, all objects and every incident in time were one-offs, un-belonging, irreconcilable.
“So — air force,” said Norfield. He’d been fiddling with the miscellaneous stuff near his cash register, and now he stopped and deliberately put his hands in his pocket.
“That’s right.”
“What. Don’t tell me. You were a pilot.”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“Europe.” Emmett didn’t want to talk about it. He wasn’t going to be one of those vets who couldn’t get over it. He dreamed of doing some kind of international work. Everything he’d experienced, everything that Norfield had been through, it had to mean something, there had to be progress, redemption. He had hope. He didn’t want to talk about Germany.
Norfield waited a moment, and Emmett thought, If he forces the issue, I’ll leave, but Norfield turned away and said, “Listen to this.”
He played a record that first drove Emmett out of his mind. Saxophone. Unnatural music. “It’s Bird,” Norfield said.
“No bird ever sang like that,” Emmett said, wanting him to take the music off.
“Listen. It’s Charlie Parker,” said Norfield. “The greatest musician of the twentieth century.”
“Listen,” Norfield said again — was it five minutes later? “That’s my soul. What I am.” Disorder precedes; instinct, nerves precede. Ideals — honour and glory and sacrifice — have been reversed in precedence: the incidents, one-offs, the terror of pocket lint, of pencils, the little girl hopping incessantly, discontinuous happenstance, a tarnished spoon, this indefinite chaos is called peace. He kept a tidy place, Norfield did, but the ten pennies must be lined up with the pencils, and it was terrifying.
Norfield lifted the needle from the record. An ashtray piled high with butts. “What’s the hour?” asked Norfield, looking ill. “Never mind. Forget it.”
Norfield put his arm around Emmett’s shoulder. Emmett took a drink of Norfield’s smell inside his clavicle. He liked it very much. He moved closer, caught himself, quickly moved away. “So tell me,” Emmett wanted to know, but what? Just tell me something. What do you believe in? “What do you believe in?” he asked.
Norfield said, “I believe in a Chinese man and his wife who shared their food with me when I was in prison.” Then he said, “Tell me about Germany.”
Emmett said, “A city called Hamburg.”
Norfield was listening to him now, like the needle.
Emmett, seeing the view from the air, confessed, “And a place called Darmstadt. And Weser. Magdeburg. Heilbronn. Some smaller sites, hydroelectric dams, missile laboratories, that kind of thing. And some medieval towns in the Baltic. Lübeck, Rostock. Old wood, you know. It burns well.” Hamburg had been the greatest success, with thirty thousand dead. Darmstadt, six thousand dead. Weser, nine thousand dead. Magdeburg, twelve thousand dead. And so on, more and more dead.
The fires rose fifteen hundred feet in the air. When they let go the four-thousand-pound “cookies,” his plane sank and then soared, black earth below turning crimson, then the next wave of planes dropping “breadbaskets” filled with incendiaries, instantly, a sea of fire, that’s what everyone said, It’s a sea of fire. Fire sucking the air out from under him, then his plane accelerating up and out of there before it inhaled him, dragged him into the dragon’s mouth, flying up, dodging flak.
“Hero,” said Norfield.
“Yeah. Well. Nobody wants to talk about it.” Bomber Command was not a popular memory. Emmett didn’t come home with a medal for heroism. Not a single man, dead or alive — and there were more than fifty-five thousand dead airmen from Bomber Command — received a medal during or after the war. And no one talked about the deaths of six hundred thousand German civilians by Allied bombing. Winston Churchill failed to mention Bomber Command in his victory speech on VE Day. Emmett was one of the untouchables. “I did what I had to do,” he said.
“You miss it?”
Emmett didn’t know him well enough. He said, “I’d rather think about the future.”
“That’s what we need more of.”
“A future.”
Norfield said, “Hitler and Hirohito are dead, but the fascists still run the show.”
Emmett didn’t know what to say to that.
Norfield went on, reluctant, as if he didn’t normally bother to explain what he meant. “Look,” he said, “look at how far the generals were willing to go. Thirty thousand dead in Hamburg? Okay. Now let’s go for a hundred-thirty, hundred-fifty thousand killed in Hiroshima. How many in Nagasaki? Eighty thousand people killed, another two hundred thousand dead from fallout, who really knows? A couple hundred thousand people exterminated with one bomb. You think the men who run this show are ever going to give up that kind of power over us?”
Emmett had never talked to anyone about this before; since coming home he’d never confessed to his actions in Germany. His pals in the air force had mostly scattered. A few of them still hung around together, but he wanted nothing to do with them. He wasn’t going to be one of those vets who couldn’t get over it. He heard an awful moan, and in a panic he looked at the record player, thinking the terrible sound came from there, and then he realized it was coming from his own gut. Norfield caught him as he was falling to his knees, and held him, the two men kneeling. Emmett was weeping. He hadn’t seen it coming.
Norfield held
him, saying nothing, just held him steadily. Emmett felt like it was almost all right. He pulled away, stood up, wiping his face. “I can’t let that happen.”
“Confuses people,” Norfield observed.
They were okay; they smiled.
Emmett still felt the effect of the pill, a weird ecstasy. His face was taut and salty. He didn’t know why he trusted Norfield with so much, but he did, he trusted him completely.
“If we don’t fight fascism,” Norfield was saying, “they’ll come for you anytime they please.” He began to fiddle with the pennies again, arranging them. “We don’t defeat the boot, we don’t defeat capitalist power, if we fail to do that, we will have nowhere to go, nohow to live except in slavery, there will be no inside where we can live free from the capitalists’ control. The police, police everywhere, they work for the rich with their international money invested in whatever it takes to keep us powerless to fight back. They’ll watch you in everything you do, you’ll be exposed at all times, my friend, there will be no privacy, they will have you by the balls.” He stopped himself, lit another cigarette.
“The communists save us from that?”
Norfield was taking a drag, but his hand stopped on its way to his mouth, and with a slight, what-a-smart-boy smile, he said, “Might just.”
The pill turned, tide going out, the only salve to his nerves was Charlie Parker again, Norfield setting the needle onto the recording; what had been torment now was hymn. “He’s good when you’re coming down.”
Norfield opened the green door to sunrise, Charlie Parker escaping. Emmett, running his nerves on Parker’s sound, overheard Norfield talk to somebody at the door.
“Good morning, Mr. Farce,” said John Norfield.
The man in the homburg hat stood at the door, a short stocky man in an expensive trench coat; he brought a hand up to scratch his nose. A diamond set in a gold wedding band caught the light. What kind of man wears clothes, jewellery like that? The hat said, “Working late?” He saw Emmett and added, “And who might you be?”
Norfield looked back at Emmett Jones. Gave him a look. Like he’d given him a disease. Like he loved him. “The hat’s a boot,” said Norfield. “Excuse me,” he said and politely closed the door, leaving the hat on the other side. Lifted the needle from Charlie Parker. Quickly turned off the light. Ashen dawn. He hurried to the stacks, took down an old book, frayed and thready, handed the book to Emmett, who stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. Norfield said, “There’s a door out the back,” guiding Emmett through his small office, his desk and typewriter, past a tiny bathroom with a sink and toilet, to a crooked door at the back of the building.
“Who is that guy?”
Norfield spoke as if he were delivering lines from Nöel Coward. “Everything important in history happens twice, my good fellow. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. You have just met Mr. Farce.” Norfield’s face was very white. He didn’t look like he had much buzz left in him. “When Mr. Farce wants to hurt you, he does it without leaving a bruise. Trick of a second-rate henchman.”
Emmett watched Norfield lock the back door. When they were standing in the lane, Emmett asked, “Is that guy coming after you, John?”
Norfield’s lips, smile on one side, neat. “You don’t want to know who’s Mr. Tragedy?”
“Sure.”
“Mr. Tragedy is dead. Forget it.”
They walked down the lane. Mr. Farce, quite possibly, following at a polite distance.
It took Emmett three days to fall asleep. All in one blow: Suzanne McCallum’s shoulders, John Norfield’s clavicle. Falling in love, loyal forever to that one glimpse of purity you see in somebody, that kind of love, he thought, is a question of instinct, a move you make before thinking, and it changes everything in a split second.
He remembered later, how he’d stammered over the jazz. Ever since Germany, he told John, he’d been lonely, yearning to go back, to belong to a greater sum, flying in a squadron, to experience power, the bliss of pure action, pure intention. Blooded, that’s what the air marshal had called it when he sent his boys out to bomb an easy target, you’ll be well blooded. You’re immortal in action. “Experience,” Emmett had said to Norfield, “cuts, it cuts into you.” He had wanted to say, Experience is love. He’d wanted to be that pilot again, to live in the sky. He slipped a novel back into the shelf, and as he did so, its paper jacket sliced his thumb.
Whatever drug it was that Norfield had given Emmett made him feel exquisitely mortal; he could feel his life, he could feel time running through his veins like a river of light, throwing him into the future. He said, “I’ve got to let the past go. We all do, we have to forget or we’ll go crazy, brother.” It was the first time he’d said “brother.”
“Selective,” Norfield had said. “Believe me. You’ve gotta be selective about what you remember, if you want to carry on.”
Chapter Four
Emmett discovered that Suzanne McCallum was in one of his classes. Funny, he hadn’t been aware of her right away. After meeting her at Norfield’s party two weeks ago, he wondered how he’d cross paths with her again; then there she was in Shakespeare, a golden girl. He sat at the back of the lecture hall, where he could look at her. Her straight back, a fine line of will and beauty, leaning to her book, intensely taking notes. Miranda, daughter of Prospero.
He began to watch for her everywhere. He’d spot her in a crowd, often with several men. He liked the way Suzanne walked; for all her elegance, a bit undone, taking big, uneven strides. He was moved by her gawky determination and unselfconsciousness, like she’d always be a girl. Soon, he intercepted her in the hall, hovered over her, and was disappointed by how casually she agreed to go for a walk with him. How eager she was to talk about Norfield. “You have a kind, handsome face,” she told him. “John Norfield is gorgeous and probably bad.” She said that she had to meet some friends, and blithely departed, “See you in Shakespeare,” her skirt swaying around her long legs.
He was disappointed. Not only did she obviously prefer Norfield, but she’d spoken glibly about an encounter that had seared him, left him obsessed. He couldn’t stop thinking about them, Suzanne and Norfield. Even Emmett’s face, with its wire-framed spectacles, the fair hair combed straight back, his forehead, nose, and chin in a golden ratio, this pleasantly honest face seemed displaced in his own mind by John Norfield’s slender, sardonic good looks. The man had made an impression on him.
In the warm splendour of that autumn he tried to rid himself of Norfield’s occupation by dropping in on him at his bookstore, meet him face to face. To split up with him, he thought.
Norfield’s bookstore was different by day, shabbier, cramped by bigger buildings. Emmett walked right by it once, then he retraced his steps and finally saw the painted sign: Norfield & Norfield. There was a shining Triumph motorcycle parked on the street out front, and when he pushed open the door, there was a bell’s bright peal that he hadn’t heard before and the rainy light of the store’s interior, the smell of paper in mouldering leather bindings.
Norfield emerged from behind the counter to greet him with obvious pleasure, embraced him, lightly slapped his cheek. “Where’ve you been?”
Emmett shrugged. “Hitting the books.” Nothing to report. Except that I see you so constantly in my mind’s eye, I feel like I’ve taken on your features. He pointed toward the window, to the sign there. “Didn’t see the name of your store in the dark the other night.”
Norfield scratched lightly at the side of his mouth. “My brother and me.” He smiled, resolute, ironic. “It keeps him in mind.”
Emmett watched Norfield’s mouth. “Is that your motorcycle?”
Norfield nodded absently and then seemed struck by a new idea. “Hey,” he said, “I was talking about you with a friend of mine, just the other day.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Told him you’re a bright guy. I told him, if you were to call him, he should definitely talk to you, you’re all right.�
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Emmett looked for imperfections in John Norfield: not merely the small scars — they added to his beauty — imperfections of spirit, of integrity. He said, “Listen. Any chance you could close shop for a while, get some lunch or something, go for a beer?”
Norfield put his hand on Emmett’s shoulder. “You listen. You should definitely talk to this guy.”
“What about?”
Norfield said, “Politics,” smiling as if this were joke, or a code. He reached for and then lit a cigarette before adding, “He’s a Jewish fellow. A survivor. You got any problem with that?”
“Of course not.”
“Hungarian Jew. Nazis picked him up in ’44.”
Outside in the sunlight, someone had stopped to look through the dusty window. Norfield was distracted, staring out the window through cigarette smoke, saying, “Smart cookie. Speaks perfect English.” He turned his eyes on Emmett, a searing effect. “He survived a camp.”
Emmett felt the chance to come close to Norfield, to actually know him and be known, slip away. His disappointment felt unworthy. He said, “Sure. Give me his number.”
The curtain behind the counter was pulled aside and there stood Suzanne McCallum. “Hello, Emmett.”
She wore a white cardigan clasped with a short string of pearls at her throat, a matching sweater underneath, and some amazing kind of brassiere. When she came around the counter, he saw that her feet were bare, the toenails painted red. She shook his hand, her overly firm grasp, beaming at him, possessed by her own beauty. She stood beside Norfield, letting her arm touch his sleeve. Norfield brusquely pulled away, twisting aside to reach for an ashtray. Emmett saw pain, pain passing through Suzanne, quick as a needle.
Chapter Five
Emmett knocked, the door opened a crack, and he was examined by a sad brown eye. He could smell, even from the dingy hall, socks, the rank pong of young men, and sweetish garbage, cigarettes, burnt coffee. Leonard of the sad eyes — different from Norfield in every way: burly, hairy, older, though like Norfield, Leonard embraced him and called him “man.”
Mr. Jones Page 3