The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  But Humphrey had not suffered the worst horrors of that period, had certainly never been in a Nazi camp. He said dryly, “I did not have privilege of going through Hitler holocaust.” Whatever had happened, he remained after the war in the Soviet Union, where he grew to adulthood with increasing disenchantment toward the government, his wisecracking ultimately leading to a stint in jail. Subsequently, he escaped the USSR, ending up in South Africa after a fool advised him to stow away on the wrong ship. This young intellectual of the Russian-Jewish tradition found himself at the southern tip of Africa, surrounded by the dim-witted cruelty of the apartheid regime. He couldn’t stand it, so left, and traveled the world. Uprooted, transient, and with the wrong mother tongue, he never achieved much. As Humphrey put it, he’d been “cornered by history.” That is, his youthful intent to consort with the Great Thinkers had been destroyed by the idiocy of his era.

  “I must talk to you,” he reiterated. He found a near-empty bottle of vodka in the freezer, emptied the last drops into a wineglass, inhaled its fumes. At the Ping-Pong table, he bounced a ball.

  “Well, talk.”

  “You think I joking,” he said, and downed his vodka. “But I am worry. Something can happen to you. Very soon.”

  “Yes, yes, I know—disaster if we don’t run off together.”

  Humphrey fetched the empty vodka bottle, miming as if to wring it for another drop. He drank modestly—rarely more than a single shot—and disdained drunkenness, which he considered the domain of trivial beings. Today, however, he needed another slug, so ventured into the Brooklyn night for more vodka. “When I come back,” he pledged, “I have important items to tell you.”

  “I’m on tenterhooks.”

  “You don’t going anywhere.”

  “Won’t.”

  Minutes later, the buzzer rang—he must have forgotten his keys.

  But it was a woman whose voice crackled over the intercom. “Helloooo! Anybody there?”

  Amazing: she just followed them, wherever in the world they went.

  “Ahoy,” Tooly answered, and held down the button to spring the building door.

  Regally, Sarah Pastore entered, kissing Tooly on the head and embracing her with a rub of the back, after which she twirled her cherry-red dyed hair, piling it up, then letting it cascade down her back. She pointed to her right cheek, directing Tooly to plant a peck into the bull’s-eye center, which she did. “Cute as ever,” Sarah said, sizing up Tooly.

  The same was not true of Sarah. She was a worn forty-two, her proportions out of proportion, bony nose almost manly, the fedora self-consciously eccentric now rather than sexy. For years, she’d been an eternal twentysomething. Now Tooly had reached that decade herself and inadvertently chased Sarah from it.

  “How long’s this stopover?” Tooly asked, and placed another kiss on Sarah’s cheek, more firmly now, as if to impress there the affection she struggled to summon.

  “Tra-la-LA-la, DEE-DUM. Tra-la-LA-la, DEE-DUM,” Sarah sang, striding away to explore this latest abode. “Who can say?” Sarah was a recurrent feature of their lives, residing with Tooly and Humphrey for spells, even traveling with them. But months could pass without word of her. Then Venn took pity, apprised her of their latest whereabouts—and there she was.

  “What brings you this time?”

  Sarah sang, “Happy birthday to you/Squashed tomatoes and stew/You look like a monkey/And you smell like one, too.” She took out a cigarette. “You’re turning twenty-one soon.”

  “I’m aware.”

  “Where’s Rumpledstiltskin?”

  “Out buying supplies.”

  “And everyone else?” By this she meant Venn. “Don’t know why, but the birthday song has been tra-la-LA-la-DEE-DUMing in my head ever since I was at this department store on Madison and Sixty-first. What’s that place, the expensive one?”

  “No idea,” Tooly said. “My clothes originate from a slightly lower class of shop.”

  “You know what we’ll do?” she said, taking Tooly by the wrists. “Go on a shopping spree. Your birthday present from me. Shall we?”

  “But paying for things, please.”

  “Of course paying for things. What are you even talking about?” She considered Tooly’s outfit: pajamas with a motif of racehorses, collar buttoned to the top, dressing gown. “It’s a crime to leave you to your own devices. In pajamas at—what time is it?”

  “Yes, what time is it?”

  “But you’re lucky,” Sarah said, scrutinizing Tooly like a car tire. “With that shape, you could wear anything. Bitch.”

  Tooly twisted away. “So could you.”

  Sarah walked to the back window, surveying the unedifying view: vehicle lights inching along the expressway. “Beautiful winter’s night,” she said, running her finger along the windowsill, across the wall, across the kitchen cupboard. “Love your new place.” She righted a toppled chess piece, pawed without interest at periodicals and books on the couch, organizing them into piles, then entered Tooly’s bedroom, plucking a sweater off the floor. “Where do you find this stuff? The Salvation Army?”

  “Yes.”

  Sarah gave a false smile, sustained by impatient muscles. “Was thinking the other day of the ice bar. And my Honda Dream. Remember that big cop?”

  “You were cool as a cucumber.”

  “Oh, hooray! How nice to hear.”

  Sarah cited old times to affirm their bond, as if shared events united people, regardless of the content. Yet the occurrences Sarah cited were not exactly those that had taken place. Hers was a record of merriment and constancy, populated by heroes and villains, rather than the ambiguous blurs that others constituted. She erased scenes, especially disasters precipitated by her mistakes, attributing those to enemies, a growing army as years passed. If someone disputed these accounts, dark clouds formed in her eyes. Venn alone baldly refuted her claims and survived. But Sarah herself barely made it through such exchanges, taking his comments like so many stabs.

  By now Tooly was less interested in the statements than in the person before her, who had once been so mesmerizing, a scintillating woman in a world composed largely of men. How often Tooly had wished for Sarah to swoop in like this and spirit her off for an adventure that—at the time—seemed the pinnacle of sophistication. Buzzing around some Mediterranean city on the back of a motor scooter, attending parties in Prague, learning Sarah’s postural rules of attraction: you know a man is attracted if he turns his body toward you when passing in a narrow corridor; if he studies your face when you speak, though you are looking elsewhere; or if he stands straighter as you approach. The prospects for any affair, Sarah stated, were all in the degree to which the male slouched.

  How captivating Sarah had been. Yet whenever Tooly had most longed for her company was when Sarah proved most elusive. She would turn up promising adventure, then be gone by nightfall. It happened in Jakarta, after Sarah traveled in on the same flight as Tooly and Humphrey, only to disappear at the airport. Then she’d joined them in Amsterdam, with the emotional pull-push that became the hallmark of her dealings with Tooly. In Malta and Cyprus that summer, she sought to transform the teenage girl into a mini-Sarah. But when she found them in Athens she gave Tooly the cold shoulder for two weeks. In Milan, Tooly witnessed Sarah snorting cocaine for the first time, and heard incessantly about her turbulent relations with a married millionaire. She and Sarah clashed in Budapest, made up in Prague. The woman had exploded in rage in Hamburg, smashed a window with her little hammer and stormed out, then located them months later in Marseille, as if nothing had happened.

  For years, Tooly’s opinion of Sarah had swung between adulation and contempt. But recently had Tooly recognized her mistake: all these comings and goings, of which she had long believed herself the principal object, concerned her only peripherally. Sarah returned for Venn, sought a pretext to be with him, even though he had rejected her years before. Each time Sarah failed anew, she shifted her attention to Tooly, meddling with the gi
rl to bother Venn, knowing how close they were.

  Today, she talked and talked. Tooly shut her eyes, concealing the thoughts behind them.

  “What?” Sarah asked. “What’s funny?”

  “Nothing’s funny,” she answered, shaking her head. “Just thinking.”

  “See, you’re the same—still laughing at life! That’s what’s extraordinary about people. Nobody changes! At heart, everyone’s the same at eight as at eighty.”

  Tooly nodded as if this were surely true (though surely it was not). Abruptly, Sarah switched rails, careening into a convoluted account of misfortunes that, by no fault of her own, had led here. “And when I went in—this will stun you—they’d taken everything. Changed the locks even, pricks.”

  “So how did you get in at all?”

  “I didn’t. I told you—they changed the locks.”

  “So how’d you know they took everything?”

  “You haven’t met these people,” she responded. “I’m telling you, the woman is psychotic. You don’t realize how things are in that part of the world. People will take you into the forest, machete you, and sell you for bush meat. The police are corrupt. You have no recourse. I was told—you’re not going to believe this—I was told they’d put me in prison (imagine a prison there!) for up to six years. I’d not even done anything. It’s enough to make you … No?” A classic end to a Sarah story: she, unjustly cast out, mistreated, slandered. Amazingly, she believed what she said, which became truer by repetition. But to claim victimhood again and again without seeming a fool obliged her to depict humanity as increasingly malign. Needfully, her worldview darkened year after year.

  Sarah’s latest plan was to move to Rome and reconquer a city abandoned a half century earlier by her father, a former Fascist now long dead. There was a leather-goods store that belonged to an Italian friend, Valter, a married accountant whom she’d often mocked because he loved her. Sarah had an eye for fashion, she said, so would run the place. “Best part is you’re coming with me! You’ll be my assistant. Aren’t you excited? You’re almost twenty-one now. Time to move on. You’ll fly back with me, agreed?”

  “Sarah, I’m not luggage.”

  “What a thing to say! I’m trying to help you. Came all this way for you.”

  “I’m fine here.”

  “Well, never say I didn’t have your best interests at heart. Okay? Anyway, I’m staying a few days.”

  “I need to check with Humph.”

  “Check what?”

  “Just let him know you want to stay.”

  “You’ve got a huge mattress—there’s not space for me for a couple of days? Remember when we used to share your tent? Seriously, I don’t see why you’re making a big deal of this. Are you trying to humiliate me?”

  “No, Sarah. Last thing I want.” Tooly reached for her, was pushed away, then placed her hand on Sarah’s upper arm, stroked it, as if soothing an animal.

  “You’re so happy to see me!” Sarah said. “How cute!”

  Tooly had spent so many years adjusting to the storms of Sarah that the habit of tranquilizing her overpowered the wish not to. To break the pattern, Tooly stepped away and rested her hand on the kitchen counter. Sarah placed hers atop, nails blood red.

  “You all right?” Tooly asked.

  “I’m fine.” She cleared her throat. “God, I don’t know.” At times like this, verging on the confessional, she evoked an aging actor before the dressing-room mirror, regarding the sagging vacancy. There was vulnerability in Sarah.

  “I hope,” she said. “I hope that bitch gets her comeuppance. I really do.”

  Tooly had lost track of all the bitches, found no need to seek clarification on this one, another among the legions opposing Sarah. And it was partly true. The world did thwart her, but not because it conspired to that end. Obstacles materialized because they did for all. Her paranoia was a form of egoism, that merciful failure of the imagination. But the truth of her condition was worse: nobody plotted against her because nobody thought of her at all.

  “How happy you were when I saved you!” Sarah said.

  “How do you mean?”

  “In Bangkok, when I saved you.” Sarah perceived the flicker of irritation. “Oh, come on—don’t act like you’re still loyal to Paul.”

  “Anyway,” Tooly said.

  A bang came from the door downstairs.

  “Probably Humph,” Tooly said. “I’ll go check.” She hastened downstairs, frigid air rushing in from the open door.

  “Hello, darlink,” Humphrey said. “You come out in pajamas? I would not believe it, if I do not hear it with my own eyes.”

  She leaned in to whisper, “The empress is back.”

  His expression transformed to disappointment, then annoyance. “I have to talk to you about important things,” he said. “Why empress is coming now? She is staying?”

  “Seems so.”

  He stared miserably.

  Sarah opened the apartment door. “Talking about me?”

  “No, no,” Tooly said.

  “Liar.”

  In the following days, Sarah rarely left, reading fashion magazines purloined from nearby stores. She was short on money, until a wire transfer came from Valter in Italy. After this, she vanished into a bar on Hoyt Street, finding overnight lodgings with the younger men carousing there, followed by awkward scenes in the morning when they said versions of “Gotta run to work; mind leaving?” Sarah returned to the apartment, where Humphrey hid behind his books, and she chain-smoked at the window overlooking the expressway, waiting for Venn to call.

  2011

  THE BOOKSHOP WAS CLOSED on Sundays, so when Tooly phoned from Connecticut, intending only to test her borrowed cellphone on a familiar number, she expected no answer.

  “World’s End,” Fogg said.

  “Oh,” she responded, “you’re not supposed to pick up.”

  “Isn’t that the custom when these things make noise?”

  “Why are you at work today?”

  “Not really working, to be fair. Just popped my head in to see everything’s in order.”

  “Very conscientious of you. But, sorry, I should go. This isn’t my cellphone and I was only—”

  “You’ll be chuffed to hear I did the Honesty Barrel this morning even though it’s Sunday,” he said. “I’m admiring it through the window as we speak—a thing of beauty. No rain this morning. There are miracles, yes, even in Wales. What’s the time by you? Middle of the afternoon in America, is it?”

  “It’s six here.”

  “Is that tomorrow morning? Or yesterday evening?”

  “It’s six in the morning. And it’s today.”

  “It may feel like today to you. But you’re still in yesterday.”

  “Fogg—we’re on the same day, you nut. It’s Sunday in both places.”

  “Can’t take a joke now you’re in America. And what on earth are you doing awake at six o’clock on a Sunday morning, if you don’t mind me asking?”

  “That’s when I get up.”

  “Don’t believe a word of it. It’ll be the jet lag. I’d like to try that one time—nice bit of jet lag on a holiday to America.”

  “I’d happily trade places,” she said. “And this isn’t a holiday. Actually, I miss the shop.”

  “Shop didn’t say a word about you.”

  “I’m slightly surprised that you haven’t burned it down yet.”

  “Burning’s not scheduled till Thursday, I’m afraid.”

  “Fogg,” she said, “aren’t you at all impressed that I’m calling you with a mobile phone?”

  “I can barely contain myself. Utterly jubilant. You’ll be ringing on a daily basis now. I’ll be a bag of nerves.” He took down her number and provided his own in case of emergencies. In the background, the bell above the shop door tinkled.

  “Customer?”

  “Probably wanting directions. Yesterday was beyond busy—three people came in,” he said. “Well, should be off and deal wi
th this.”

  “You’ve become disconcertingly attentive.”

  Children’s footsteps thundered above her—Duncan’s triplets awake and running across the floor.

  “I should go myself,” she said.

  Tooly took an early train into Manhattan to allow the McGrory family a little time together. She attempted to rest at the hotel but was too anxious, running through her questions for Humphrey, shaky to know that answers were hours away now. To expel tension, she set forth on the long hike to south Brooklyn.

  Her walk took hours, yet she arrived in Sheepshead Bay early, so continued onward to the Russian enclave of Brighton Beach, wandering down its main avenue, shadowed by the elevated-train platform. Whenever subway carriages clattered overhead, sunlight strobed over the street-level nail parlors, clothing wholesalers, bankruptcy consultants. Side streets provided distant glimpses of sand—this was as far south as Brooklyn went before hitting ocean. Along the boardwalk, stubby seniors in wraparound shades gripped radios that crackled in Russian. The Atlantic sloshed now and then.

  To prepare her, Duncan had insisted on meeting a few minutes beforehand. “We have to be punctual,” he informed her, locking his BMW outside the Sheepshead Bay station. “Your dad gets agitated if people are late, thinks he’s got the time wrong.”

  “This apartment he lives in—you said it’s not great, right?”

  “Well, the building got attention in the local press when a couple of Uzbek guys there were arrested for playing tennis with a mouse.”

  “That’s horrendous.”

  “It’s a weird place. You’ll see.”

  Graffiti covered the glass entrance door, spray paint having run in long streaks under each tag. Duncan punched a code into the digital access pad and shouldered inside, finding a nervous Chinese man who’d just emerged from an apartment, key still in lock. The man said, “No, no,” waving them away.