The mortician is younger than Paul expected. In his early forties, a widow's peak rising into a swipe of dark black hair above his angular face, Wolff leans back in a high leather chair with the studied ease of an executive. Paul is a tourist in these affairs of mortality. It's his father who will depart the known world, a man Wolff has never laid eyes on, but at the instant Frank Metzger ceases to be a human being and becomes only a body, he becomes Wolff's business. For him death is a practical rather than a philosophical riddle. Wolff is the one who's willing to put his fingers under the skin, the one who knows how to get a dead body into a suit; he's the one who fires up the cremator. One of his palms, Paul notices, lies carelessly open on the table between them, as if waiting for a coin.
'Do you have any siblings?'
'None,' says Paul.
'A wife?'
'No.'
'So it's only you. That's quite a burden for a son.'
Even in the wake of his disappointing reception in Berlin, Frank pursued the Bund's work with the blindness and the happiness of religious devotion. His fame continued to grow – in fact, it began to spill over into the wider world as word spread of the organization. On the eve of Hitler's invasion of Poland, prosecutors indicted several of the leadership at the Long Island camp. Frank wasn't among them. But because of his notoriety within the party, his was the face the newspapers ran to accompany the articles; at that age he had the kind of severe, slightly fussy handsomeness people expected of a Nazi. Later, in 1944, he was part of a group that was put on trial for sedition. Prosecutors alleged a widespread Nazi conspiracy to overthrow the American government. Newspapers across the country reported it, deriding Frank as little more than a dull pawn of his German handlers. He spent two months in prison, but in the end the charges against him and the others were dropped for lack of evidence.
'On the phone you said he was still in the hospital.'
'Yes. They expect him to—' Paul coughs. 'That is, any day now.' He dislikes euphemism, but others seem to prefer it around death. 'My father doesn't have any friends, that I know of.' Not sure why he has made a point of saying this now, he decides to add, 'He and I aren't especially close.'
The mortician scratches his nose with his ring finger. It's bare. Paul finds it odd that this man isn't married; undertakers, like politicians, should have wives, conventional family arrangements.
'May I ask if you are still able to speak with him, Mr Metzger?'
'Call me Paul.'
'May I ask that, Paul?'
After the trial Frank left New York for Arizona – it meant going west, a new start. For two years he sold topsoil and fertilizer. He sulked, plotted, daydreamed. And he married his first wife, who knew nothing of his past. Then, only three years after departing, he returned to New York with bride and new son in tow. The Nuremberg trials and the continued unearthing of evidence about the death camps and the extent of the Nazis' crimes maintained interest in the villains of the war. Reporters knocked regularly on the door of their small house in Brooklyn. With time the interest died; the knocking stopped. Frank drifted back into the ordinary swim of humanity. Few people still recognized his name. The man whose picture had been splashed across newspapers faded behind history – his infamy wouldn't survive even for a generation.
'He can't speak, no. The doctors say it's possible he understands me when I talk to him, but I don't believe them.' Paul laughs. 'He looks dead. Only the machines believe he's not.'
There is an uneasy silence. Paul coughs again. At last the funeral director speaks.
'So often we look for an easy way through this, but there never is one.'
When Paul was in college the father of a close friend died unexpectedly. They have since lost touch, he and the friend, but he remembers the powerful feeling of watching someone endure that rite of passage. In the days that followed, his friend stood up to it – like a man, the words they used – even though he and his father were surely closer than Paul is with his. The event bestowed upon the friend an aura, a masculine gravity. His steadfastness became myth. There's none of that now. Fathers die.
'Is it possible to hold the service here?'
'We have a space, if that's what you wish.'
'My father wasn't a religious man. There's no reason to use a church.' Wolff's uninviting silence stops Paul before he can offer a further explanation. 'I'd like to see it, the room.'
'Of course,' says Wolff, rising.
His past was too much. He lost the wife, the son. She swore never to speak to her husband again, but from time to time, and with his mother's blessing, the boy, called Ben, visited – he was young and carried around a natural curiosity about his father. He arrived at Frank's door for the last time when he was seventeen, and then only to tell him that he had made up his mind to jettison the name Metzger. He wanted nothing to do with Frank's disgrace, a crime so great that, although he was not yet born at the time, he considered it unforgivable. He would make his way in the world as Ben Wald. He then, and ever, considered himself fatherless.
They travel the same channels that brought Paul to the director's office. Wolff turns right and opens a large set of white doors; in the room beyond there are no windows and the lights are off. Paul is the first to enter. For an instant he's alone. The awareness that this room, of all rooms, has hosted so much death, so much grief, puts Paul in a reverent mood: for a different man it might be a religious moment. Faith – the manufacture of certainty in the dark. Behind him, he hears Wolff turn a switch, and then an insectlike hum as electricity pours into the old lamps.
'As you can see, we have everything you'll require,' says Wolff, but Paul only half listens. The room, now lit, is a drab affair. Chairs wait in military lines, their upholstery well-worn by so many mourners; paths of gnarled thread streak the carpet between the rows where the living walk, where restless shoes knead the floor during the recitation of the deceased's life. Everything's old, nothing like the modern style, the lucid precision, elsewhere in the building. Time has ground down the room, and it repulses Paul, the thought not of his father but of anybody spending his last day above-ground here.
'Most of our clients do choose to hold the service in a church,' says Wolff, as if sensing Paul's thoughts.
'This is fine.'
Later Frank remarried, a much younger woman, a secretary at the company where he'd found work. They had a son. But fatherhood was too much for him; marriage, too, was surely difficult, even though, only two years after the birth of their child, she died – in a car accident, with her lover, the first Frank knew of the affair. All the dreams of his earlier days, of poetry and eminence, were gone. He didn't write. Instead he sank into years and years of silence and isolation. After his younger son left for college he did not again share his home with another person.
Paul doesn't normally think of the Frank who swore an oath to Hitler. His own memories are of a man who even in good restaurants fished ice cubes out of the water glass because they hurt his teeth; who spoke little and slept late; who never had the stomach for anything stronger than beer. But those things don't matter, not to anyone else. The existence of a domestic self doesn't exculpate a man from his poor choices. To the wider world it means nothing that he could claim the qualities all fathers, all men, have. Bentham may be right: a book could sell. And it could even make use of such facts as these, but by themselves they aren't enough. Each detail would have to be cased in a thick rime, a reminder that – yes – Frank Metzger was a Nazi, too.
Wolff's voice breaks in. 'Will you desire a viewing of the body?'
'That won't be necessary. He wants to be cremated.'
The pain of his father's past has always been oblique, coming at him crabwise, sneaking in when he least expects it, because there isn't ever a moment when one expects to have such a man for a father. He's never made his peace with it. Most of the time he simply forgets about it. For Paul it doesn't have the piquant sting of lived experience, living memory; it is an inherited shame. It is a story. Even so, w
hen something imposes the facts upon him, as this morning has, he can't stop thinking about it, worrying it, like a kid with fresh stitches.
Coming upon a man selling meat from a cart, he stops, aware that he's been walking quickly and without a destination. Cottony white steam pours from the grill, where heaps of shredded beef and chicken cook, mixed with onions and green peppers and caked in aromatic red spice. Saliva creeps under his tongue. Lately his eating habits have been sporadic, and he is suddenly, violently hungry; he orders a sandwich and then disposes of it in several bites. Wiping the sauce from his fingers with a napkin, he starts again up the street, more deliberately now, passing a gaunt figure hawking newspapers for a quarter. He buys one.
Paul's mouth burns from the strong taste of onions and, while it isn't yet one o'clock, he stops at a bar, orders a dark ale, and gingerly takes a first sip. It is good: it is exactly what he wants. He drinks the rest quickly and orders a second, flipping the pages of the newspaper but finding it difficult to concentrate. He sucks the head off the fresh glass of black beer; already the alcohol packs his brain like crushed ice. Light from the windows comes at him sharply, and the rhythm of drinking slows his thoughts, dials down the anxiety that lingers after the encounters with Bentham and Wolff. He drinks.
His thoughts tilt toward Claire. This is inevitable, he knows, even if she hadn't invited him up last night. He is constantly miserable over her, and so thinks about her constantly, and when he drinks he is miserable over and thinks about her even more. His hasn't been a distinguished reentry into bachelorhood. The sex with his ex-wife yesterday is the only sex he's had since the divorce. For a while he'd found himself in bars again; there were a couple of dates. But he no longer wants the difficult pleasure of surprise, the labor of uncertainty. Once upon a time it was exciting: a new person, new mind, new body. The narcissism of collecting the affections of different women. He has no need for that now. With Claire the work is done, and he is far enough along in life to realize that it is work, interrogating another person about her life and narrating your own for her; they are always stories you have told before, and, worse, hers are somehow ones you have already heard. Such is the cost of new romance. Even the disappointment of last night hasn't drained him of the wish to have her again. Paul doesn't believe it is nostalgia. Nostalgia is a fantasy, an ingrown wish. What he feels is a highly practical emotion, a desire to map the shortest possible route to contentment and peace. He isn't delusional, he hasn't any misconceptions about what a return to life with Claire would be like: it wouldn't come out gleaming or bright, like a freshly minted coin. But it would improve on what he has. If that's nostalgia, he thinks, so be it.
He drinks.
They met when she was twenty-four and he was thirty. She was working at a gallery in Chelsea and Paul, still balancing himself within the world, testing himself against it, was gathering his first real plumes of success as a writer. His name appeared frequently in those days, and in more places; editors kept his details to hand. He was dating casually, seeing a couple of women at a time, success like a renewable resource, a currency he could convert from work to sex and back again, its value always multiplying, and when he walked down the street in the middle of the day his blood beat with possibility. He ran regularly, used the gym. He felt young, strong, tight as a fist. He was a little thinner then.
Art was a serious interest long before he met her – even if his was an amateur's taste – and he'd decided to spend that particular afternoon at a few galleries, saving for last a group of new works by Gerhard Richter. This was the summer of 2000. Claire was standing at the desk, dealing with some papers, and Paul happened to catch her at a moment of private amusement. She was reading a document, and a dimple emerged at only one side of her mouth – an incidental gesture, meant for no one, yet it illuminated an intelligence and equanimity, a rich interior. The self she stored away from the world at hand. It didn't hurt that she had a lovely face, her brown hair pulled casually together into a clip, and, under a black skirt, a striking body, the kind that makes a man helplessly clench his teeth. Paul, standing at one of the paintings with his back to her, was working out what he might say, when to his great surprise she approached him.
'Are you looking to buy or just to rent?'
He was accustomed to being the clever one and, charmed, smiled a little more than he meant to.
'Is it that obvious?'
'Is what obvious? That you aren't here to throw around your millions?'
'You never know.'
'All but one or two of these were sold privately before we ever put them up. If you were the kind of man with the money to buy a Richter, your art consultant would have told you that.'
'What's the point of showing them at all? If you are so certain I don't have the cash to lay out for one.'
'Naturally, we have to maintain our considerable public profile.'
She smiled. He was not surprised to see that she had a wonderful smile.
'Then you're saying this one isn't up for sale.'
'I'm afraid not. You didn't have your heart set on it, I hope.'
'Where's it headed?'
'Dubai.'
By the time he left the gallery they'd arranged to have dinner. Over the next few weeks they met with growing urgency, confidence, heat; Paul stopped calling the other women. They secluded themselves. In his own life, at least, he knew of no precedent for the ease with which they discarded the previous versions of themselves in favor of a new, shared idea.
And for a while it remained so. Love fell on them as certainly and powerfully as sleep. He met her parents – they were polite and distant – and gave an account of his own. In the absence of a test, an episode of hardship, love was simple. Sex was regular and exhausting. He wanted to be depleted each night in her arms, to be fully spent, only so that she could replenish him. When they could, they made love in the afternoons. Winter came. In the cold their love condensed, hardened, like a seam of coal. Ice lashed the windowpanes. The wind screamed. They didn't care, they were in bed.
Spring. A thaw. Flowers budded, released their fists. Then an accident – Claire was late. For two days they talked it over. Marriage was mentioned and forgotten. Careers. Timing. And children, Claire said, made her wary. When she was a child she had felt like an interloper in her own parents' marriage; she wanted to be a better mother than that. I'm so young, she said. Paul may have replied, I'm not. He let it go, waited for her outside the doctor's.
That could have been it. With friends they were the same, but, alone together in a room, it was there, the little ghost. It isn't the most important thing in the world, she told him. We can move on. She wasn't being honest, but the lie helped. Slowly the oxygen returned to their relationship. The following summer was dreamy, uneventful, and, even if some of the burning of those early months had been lost, it was replaced by a new security and comfort. They were always generous, gracious, deferential. The leaves became dry, the air smelled like copper.
Six months after the planes hit the towers, they were married. Recalling the day, Paul drinks; he bites off a mouthful of beer as if it must be torn apart from the rest. More of her friends than his came to the wedding – she was younger and hadn't yet shed the relationships of college. By then his career as a writer was beginning to idle; he wasn't sure how it happened, what derailed him. He is even less certain now. The child they didn't have was never discussed, nor were the children they might one day have. It was assumed, or Paul assumed, that eventually, when the time felt right and the circumstances of their lives were suited to it, a luxury of forethought unknown for almost the entire span of human history, they would decide to conceive.
The fights started in the second year. Small things, at first. At some point Paul said what he was really thinking. So did she. Timing. Careers – hers by then describing a much more auspicious ascent. And she was still wary of children. He told her that he always imagined it as a son; at this she cried. He now remembers those arguments with bitter clarity, when
in fact they were the exception. For the most part he and Claire were happy. They talked, fucked, traveled. It was what he wanted from a woman and from life. Even when they argued it was good, the reconciliation, the sturdiness and certainty of it, the knowledge that they always had safe terrain to return to. Children could wait.
With one swallow Paul halves the beer in his glass. There's a television above the bar and, sick of his thoughts, he asks to have it turned on. The screen jitters to life and the bartender looks at Paul, who nods. It's CNN. In silence a camera sweeps across a large crowd: yet another demonstration. He can feel the beer between his throat and his stomach. Dozens of faces fill the screen. A flag in the background – Syria's, Iran's, whatever – beats the air.
Paul calls back the bartender and orders another. When it arrives, he takes a greedy, immediate swallow. He's a little drunk. He barricades himself against further thoughts of Claire and looks again at the television. The camera pans toward the epicenter of the protest, and without the newscaster's voice there is no telling what may come next. It wouldn't surprise him if when the camera finally comes to a stop its gaze has settled on a dead body. He drinks.
Flames fill the screen, crisp and orange at the edges and at the center a deep, nightmarish black. It isn't yet apparent what's burning. Then the camera retreats and Paul can see the white cross and red field of the Danish flag. The camera leisurely absorbs the sight as the fire eats away the fabric's resistance. Nobody's dead. The image vanishes and into its place pops the anchorwoman's head. Eerie in her silence, strangely captive, she moves her mouth like a doll without its ventriloquist. Her well-trained face betrays no emotion.
Paul doesn't feel well. He takes another drink of his beer and immediately regrets it, as his body seems to be in mild revolt – nausea, headache, and feverishness set upon him at once. His ribs ache. For a moment the awful gurge of vomit seems to be rising within him, but he swallows dryly, pays for his drinks, and steps into the street. Once there he stands quite still and fixes his mind penitently on the simple acts of breathing and staring, as he contains and then patiently works down the sense of discomfort. The effort is made greater by the difference of sunlight – harsh, white, Martian – on slightly drunk eyes. The people who pass have their heads down, their bodies sheathed. Litter on the concrete swirls in the wind. He can walk: he begins to move. He refuses to admit that it might have been a mistake not to seek medical attention immediately after the attack last night – it was easier just to tough it out. Nothing was broken; bruises heal. Going to the hospital seemed unnecessary, to say nothing of the cost for an uninsured man. Nor does he intend to file a police report, which wouldn't do much good: he'd be able to offer only a cursory description, and the intended victim, anyway, was the boy; Paul was a byproduct. Better just to forget it.
City of Strangers Page 5