American Romantic

by Ward Just

  She was silent. Then, after a moment, Sieglinde said, I may be an emigrant my whole life. Before she died, my mother said she hoped I would find a place in the world. And now I suppose I have, like it or not.

  A rolling stone, he said, an attempt at a joke.

  Perhaps a rolling stone, she said. You like it here. I know that.

  I like my job and my job’s here.

  You don’t miss America?

  Not yet, he said.

  I wonder why, Sieglinde said.

  The time was now four in the morning. They were lying toes-to-head, head-to-toes, in the silk-string hammock. The night was very warm, their bodies slick with sweat. Harry’s toenails were thick and ragged, Sieglinde’s tiny, painted pink, bright thimbles of color at Harry’s ear. The hammock moved but slightly and the heavy leaves of the trees overhead did not move at all and at that moment, dawn far away, even the rotation of the earth seemed to slacken, a useless castaway lariat. Sieglinde’s eyes were closed, her hands curled up under her chin. She was lovely in the moonlight, her skin the color of alabaster. There were emigrants all over the world, fugitives from oppression or famine, disease, revolution, heartbreak, simple boredom, bad memories. He did not like to think of her as one of those now here, now there, always far from home. At first when she began to tell her story, he believed she was laden with guilt, feeling that she was somehow responsible for the calamity in her family. But it wasn’t guilt. She was furious at the turn of events in her early life. Furious at the war, the struggles, the deaths. He remembered a story the ambassador told him. The ambassador had visited the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw with an old friend, a worldly Jew. His friend took care to examine the gravestones, everyone dying in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945—and when he came upon a grave marked 1952 he gave a little strangled laugh and said, At last, someone dead of natural causes.

  Harry was looking at Sieglinde and thinking about nationality and responsibility, always different in the old world than the new. Except for Native Americans, everyone in the United States came from somewhere else. All the nations of the world were represented in America. Homogeneous nations had a tighter fix on responsibility when things went wrong, and the result was either bloodshed or a sullen quietus with subterranean thoughts of revenge because there had been a stab in the back. Nothing had ever gone so wrong in America with the exception of the Civil War, and President Lincoln, dead from an assassin’s bullet, became the nation’s most revered figure. Harry held the thought, thinking that it needed refining. Sieglinde stirred, muttering something, and curled her hands more firmly at her throat. She said, What are you thinking about? You’re so quiet.

  He said, You.

  The streetlight at the end of the long driveway cast a wan glow. Now and again in the street, heard faintly but not seen beyond the high hedge, were bicyclists, announced by the splash of rubber tires. The police, perhaps, or workmen on their way to the early shift. Harry took no notice. He believed himself secure in the world, the silk-string hammock as invulnerable as golden-armored Orion high above in the summer sky, light years away. Sieglinde stirred once more and Harry thought of her freckle-faced father, off to the war, less than a week to live, posing for her mother’s camera. She had called him a hell-raiser, and what did she mean by that? He was good with engines. Liked to clown for the camera. None of Harry’s own family had gone to war, neither the Great War nor the one after that. He was the closest anyone in his family had come, if you call a few random and ill-aimed shots near a no-name river at dusk being “under fire.” During World War II it seemed to him that his parents went to a funeral every other week, though it was surely much less than that. He had not thought to ask Sieglinde about her childhood. He supposed it was misplaced tact that caused his reticence, and they had known each other only one week. Now he knew her memories were not happy, her father dead, her mother absent, a diminished life in a defeated nation. She seemed to be on the run from all that. Sieglinde had not thought to ask him either, so she was spared descriptions of Connecticut, the clapboard houses and their swimming pools, the cocktail hour, the yellow hills rolling off to the mysterious interior. Political talk at table on Sundays, a self-conscious yet sincere effort to be engaged in the affairs of the nation, civic responsibility. Would these memories, his and hers, speak to each other? They would not. A German childhood of the twentieth century would be a grueling experience, most strenuous, one could say a burden or nemesis—both justice and retribution, the irreconcilable tension between remembering and forgetting. Certainly there would have been good times in the early days following 1932, things returning to normal, patriotism rekindled, community gatherings around towering bonfires with inspiring speeches and song, the nation rising once again, fresh confidence, industrial production up, inflation in check, an audacious ambition that resulted in peaceful coexistence at last with the ominous Soviet Union, a miracle of diplomacy worthy of the Iron Chancellor himself. In less than a decade, all of it in ruins.

  Sieglinde had not mentioned her childhood until this evening, her wordy coda to five hours of more or less constant lovemaking. It had been a while for him and, he suspected (probably the better word was hoped), for her, too. The silk-string hammock took some getting used to, so for a while they were a kind of ménage à trois, afloat and then not afloat. The hours became minutes and the minutes seconds, until they were both outside of time altogether, slick and overheated; and when they gave themselves over to it, he found another, happier self, an assured self, one he had not known existed. Her eyes were closed, her face rosy, and she was smiling. This went on and on in a circle of abandon, time expanding, time diminishing, time uncrowded, and in a moment of drowsy delight he proposed that they remain in the hammock forever, or anyway until they were too old for lovemaking, and even then there were ways and means, and if the ways and means failed they had memories enough from just this one flawless night—and what did she think of that idea? Her answer was another arpeggio on his thigh. He dozed, half asleep and half not, conjuring a meeting between her memories and his, not only this night but from their childhoods, a sort of symposium without a moderator. Her father was in a dark corner of the room drinking schnapps. His father was explaining Marsden Hartley to her mother, a startlingly pretty woman who wore thick glasses and a white silk ascot. Then his mother interrupted to mention the Regency table, unsuitable for informal gatherings, which this certainly was. She abruptly switched to German but the effort was unsuccessful, and Mrs. Hechler nodded in agreement and asked if there was anything to eat. General Marshall was gazing out the window, distraught at the number of Germans in the room. Who brought them? Why were they here? Congresswoman Finch asked the general for a light and he lit a match, his fingers trembling slightly. He said softly, I don’t understand a word of their damned language. Mrs. Finch smiled grimly and said, I know. Sieglinde offered to translate but the offer was not taken up. From the dark corner, Corporal Hechler was polishing the buckle on his infantryman’s belt and humming the overture to Tannhäuser. Finally, at a loss, everyone fell silent. Harry slept.

  A little later, Harry extracted himself from the hammock and stepped across the lawn to the villa. He fetched a bottle of lager from the fridge and stood in the kitchen looking across the tree shadows to the hammock and the high hedge beyond. Sieglinde was invisible but the hammock looked full, motionless in the still night air. The neighbor’s cat, black with white paws, scuttled up the ficus tree and sat on the low branch. Harry lit a cigarette and walked back outside, as contented as he had ever been. More than content. He had the idea that he could snap his fingers and summon an orchestra or a black-tied waiter with a tray full of champagne. The grass was wet underfoot, cool to the touch. It took a moment to resettle in the hammock, cigarette in one hand and the bottle of lager in the other. Sieglinde took one long pull on the cigarette and another from the bottle of lager and closed her eyes again, settling her head on his shoulder. In a growly sort of voice, Harry began to tell her about the clinic and
Village Number Five, the headman with the bundle in his arms. The settlement was immaculate, not even a gum wrapper or cigarette stub, his own silence in the face of it all. He stopped there, the experience so strange in retrospect he was unable to describe it with precision—and he realized then that he would have this story for the rest of his life and in time it would become as shopworn as a much-used passport, the visa stamps smudged, illegible dates, illegible signatures, the hodgepodge of a traveler’s life. His own photograph was anonymous, not a good likeness; his signature was undecipherable. What had been crisp was now blurred. The bare bones of a well-told story required coherence, ironic asides, and a plot as well knit and tied together as a jigsaw puzzle and somewhere in it a detail as provocative as a cat in a tree.

  Go on, Sieglinde said.

  I’m thinking, Harry replied. What he meant was, I’m trying to get the sequence of things straight in my own mind. The exact time of day. The precise shape of the headman’s bundle. The dimensions of the clinic; well, he had those. But he could not summon an account of his own emotions—not fright, something other than fright. The clinic was smoldering, he said to Sieglinde, and the scene before him seemed like a relic from the century before, an eternal tableau vivant. It was as if he were witnessing an event from history, something written about in books and puzzled upon—the fall of Carthage, the construction of the Great Wall of China. Hamlet’s soul. The headman looked through him as if he were made of glass, superfluous in any case. He had the idea that an invisible hand was in charge, a manifestation of fate itself, implacable, not to be denied, not to be understood most of all. This small corner of the world, he said to Sieglinde, was not my business. I felt I had no right to be there. I was an interference. My presence was an offense. More than an offense, a provocation. I had arrived unannounced and uninvited, as if I had every right to be there, almost an obligation—to open the door without knocking and be welcomed without question. My clinic, my laissez-passer. The bundle moved and I saw that it was a woman, at first I thought a child, and then I knew she was old. The headman carried her easily, as if she were weightless. Harry said to Sieglinde, And when the woman died at last, I took one step back. When the sergeant called to me from the boat, I could hear the fear in his voice, a kind of stutter, his desire to be quit of village life. I hesitated only a little while before walking away in order to leave them in peace, the last two inhabitants. They were lost as surely as if they had been in a death camp or on the Titanic. The headman remained still as stone on the top step of the clinic stairs, smoke misting around him. When I turned at last to go I saw four soldiers emerge from the clinic looking dazed. They were filthy and obviously disoriented and almost at once one of them saw me and unslung his carbine and said something, I had no idea what. I do not have the language, and so we were strangers to one another. But his meaning was not difficult to imagine. Stop! Who are you? What are you doing here? I decided to ignore him and walk away. I pretended to myself that he was not present. That he was not armed. And that is what I did, and when I reached our boat he remained where he was, now with a look of—I would call it disgust. The sergeant told me later he had fired one round, but I did not hear it and doubted the sergeant’s word. Later, when we took fire from the shore, I knew somehow that we would not be harmed. The shooting was a farewell. Adieu. Don’t come back. And we motored on without incident. Early this morning I attempted to write a report of the affair. We call it a “report for the file.” But it wouldn’t write. It was a sentence fragment, you see. So I went to Mass and listened to the songs and the interminable sermon at the end, all the while looking at the light falling through the Connecticut Window and thinking of Cardinal Newman’s directive. Thinking about it, I concluded that my fate was to witness events I didn’t understand and would never understand. The way of the world. I did believe that the invisible hand had shown its cards, a specific prophecy, perhaps a warning—and what that warning was, I cannot say.

  Nothing good, Harry concluded.

  Sieglinde yawned. She said, I don’t believe in invisible hands.

  Harry said, You should. You don’t know what you’re missing.

  I think you are an American romantic, Harry.

  I’ve been told that before.

  I think also that you love the war. I think you have found your life in the war. Everything else is an interlude.

  That’s not true, Harry protested, and even as he said it he knew that Sieglinde was on to something. A partial truth, certainly: not the whole truth, but still a useful truth, though not to Harry.

  Why did you tell me that story?

  It was on my mind. Who else would I tell it to? I had the feeling you might see something in it that I didn’t. Or couldn’t.

  She said, Maybe I did.

  He said, I had to tell it to someone.

  Did it bother you, your afternoon in the village? What did you call it? Village Number Five?

  Bother? Bother would not be the word.

  No, she said, I suppose not.

  But believe me, the invisible hand was real enough.

  Oh, she said dismissively, that again.

  Fireflies gathered in the crown of the tree, a kind of celestial starburst or halo. Dawn came softly, silky pink and then crimson. Exposed in the daylight, their Garden of Eden stark in the glare, their emotions were disconnected. They might have been strangers. Harry wished he had never brought up the village, the headman and the dead woman, or the invisible hand. A busted flush, it turned out. He supposed Sieglinde was uncomfortable with enigma. That would be the German in her. Germans were uncomfortable with enigma generally, even Nietzsche. “God is dead.” But Harry did not appreciate her silence now, nor the stubborn expression that went with it. They carefully disentangled themselves from the hammock and stood together, swaying a little. Then her hand flew to her mouth and she gave a sharp cry, stumbling backward, losing her balance. Harry looked up and saw the cat in the tree, its back arched, yawning, its slender tail coiled around its legs.

  My God, she said. It’s a cat. I didn’t know what it was—

  Only a cat, Harry said.

  I thought it was a snake, she said.

  They walked the few steps to the villa. She allowed him to take her hand but did not seem happy about it. He fetched two robes from the bedroom and gave one to her in the unlikely event the houseman, Chau, showed himself. Harry made a pot of coffee and they sat side by side at the kitchen table without speaking. Sieglinde looked uncomfortable in the robe, as if by accepting it she had assumed an obligation. Harry watched the sunlight gather. Somewhere far off he heard the thumpa-thumpa of a helicopter and a car’s horn in the street. It seemed the morning did not belong exclusively to them, Sieglinde and him. She pulled the robe tightly around her and bent over the coffee cup, the coffee too hot to drink. How did they reach this point of discord? Harry knew it was something he said or something he failed to say. He had been misunderstood, certainly. He looked out the window at the limp silk-string hammock and remembered a conversation he overheard years before between his father and his father’s oldest friend. The friend had recently separated from his wife and was explaining that they, he and the wife, could not agree on the definition of “virtue” and once they understood that, the fundamentals of it, the disagreement seemed to illuminate everything else. All their disputes over how a life should be lived, including who was responsible for what in the household. A great relief, really. Once they discovered their irreconcilable views on the subject of virtue, the marriage was ended, case closed. Harry remembered a long uncomfortable silence and then his father clearing his throat and giving a wan laugh. Virtue? You can’t be serious. Never more, the friend said.

  Harry said, I’ve offended you.

  Yes, I think you have. You didn’t mean to. Perhaps that’s worse.

  Can we forget it?

  It’s better forgotten, she said with a slight smile.

  We can come back to it later, Harry said.

  Or not at all, Sieg
linde said.

  When we know each other better.

  Sieglinde did not reply to that.

  It’s my job, Harry said. It’s what I do. I’m assigned somewhere and I go. Today it’s the war, and if you’re a foreign service officer and want to get ahead, that’s where you must be. The war is in first position. You could be somewhere else, New Zealand or Portugal, but what would be the point? Or back at the State Department in Washington, moving pieces of paper from the in box to the out box and back again. That’s part of the drill, too, tedious but necessary. That’s where I’ll be in a year, Washington. But right now it’s important to understand what’s wrong here. And much is, and the end is not in sight. The war is the interlude, Sieglinde.

  She said, What kind of war is it that we can devote six hours to screwing in a hammock?

  He said, I think there was some of that even in the Great War. Even in the trenches.

  She was silent a moment, idly stirring sugar into her coffee. She said, My grandfather was in the Great War. He never spoke of it. Not one word. But he left behind a diary, a day-by-day account of his life. A thick diary, ninety-two pages. He began with full paragraphs, often accompanied by drawings. He was a competent draftsman. And ended with two- and three-word entries and one word repeated: Shrecklichkeit. Frightfulness. My feeling was that the sense of life, the pulse of it, had been drained from him. He was a shell. A husk of a man. And he lived to great age, perhaps because there was so little of him to be kept alive. I do not think there was sex in the trenches, Harry. Not at Verdun. Not on the Somme. I have discussed this with the ship’s doctor and we agreed that Herr Freud was wrong, perhaps because he led a sheltered life. Sex is not the primal instinct. Survival is. I have to say that my other grandfather was the lucky one. He was killed in 1916 and did not bother to keep a diary. His experiences died with him. The one who lived, quite frankly, frightened me. I think he frightened himself.