“Yes,” he said. “Not for quail so much as for—I don’t know the name. Kurapatka.” He drew a picture in the mud.
“Some kind of grouse?” I said. “Or partridge.”
“And this,” he said. He drew another picture.
“It’s either a woodcock or a snipe,” I said. “That’s sort of in between.”
“Smaller,” he said. “Byeskaz.”
“Snipe.”
“And ducks,” he said. “They fly down the rivers in the fall. They fly all the way to Persia. Even to India, they say.”
We stepped out of the woods. The meadow stretched for more than a mile, rolling down to another stretch of woods that lined a creek. The grass was knee high in places. There were a few solitary stunted pines, some flowering thistles, and dried-out Queen Anne’s lace. High above us there was a wind blowing the clouds slowly to the west, where—far in the distance—we could see the Blue Ridge. There the sun was shining through breaks in the cloud cover.
He walked ahead of me and stopped to look. I felt a twist of annoyance. The dog trotted stiffly back to him and nudged his knee. Pavel didn’t pay any attention to him and the dog lay down heavily, raising his eyes to me to see if I’d be any quicker to get down to hunting. Pavel turned around and looked at me curiously. I don’t know what he saw in my face—I was in the middle of changing my mind about having him there. After all, he was as much another dimension as the place. He raised his free arm and let it fall back to his side.
He said, “I would never have known this part of the world was like this.”
The dog got up, stretched, and yawned. I said to him, “Hie on.” He began to quarter the field with his stiff trot, going back and forth like a windshield wiper, always about thirty yards in front of us. We went across the field, pulling our legs through the tall grass, the dog padding back and forth, concentrated and happy, and far, far in front of us the Blue Ridge were spotted with moving sun and shadow.
The day went by as though it were tied to us—slowly when we were going slowly through the grass, enveloped and calmed by the still air; and then whirring up with the covey, swinging with the guns, bounding around with the dog as he eddied through the cover finding the fallen birds; and then stopping with long bright surprise as a single quail popped up and away past our empty guns; and settling on us again as we passed through some more woods and into a farther field.
We circled back to the house about four in the afternoon. Seven quail. Not bad, not good. We thought it was a triumph, and the dog thought we were geniuses, since he couldn’t count. We cleaned the birds and fed him the hearts and livers. We fried two of the birds, along with some bacon. We made a fire and let the dog come in the house. We had a few drinks and watched the sun go down.
Just as we were getting back into the car after dropping the dog off at the tenant farmer’s house, I was feeling so full and effusive that I almost told him everything about what I was supposed to ask him. As a kind of present of confidence. Of course, I checked myself.
In fact, I could almost feel the caution—the security—fence off that whole subject in my mind. It was a sudden shock, as though something clanged down around me. At first I was pleased that I knew how to keep quiet even after a few drinks. Then I had a sense of resentment even stronger than I’d had in the morning at Pavel for coming into my land. But it was a more frustrated resentment, because there was nothing I really wanted to do about this intrusion. In a way, it was my own.
The following Tuesday I went back to the art gallery on M Street. I was careful to bring back the objet. I went to the back room and said, “No go.”
My visitor from the other agency said, “What did he say?”
I said, “He’s very loyal, that’s all.” For some reason I’d thought that would be all I’d have to say.
“How do you know?”
“He said so,” I said. “Sort of.” I wasn’t very well prepared. It upset me, because I usually like to do presentations well—especially to other agencies.
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say it in so many words,” I said. “I just inferred that he liked it here O.K., but that he would be glad to get back. That’s all.”
“How do you know?”
And so it went. Did Pavel try to make an overture to me? Did he complain about any of his superiors? Did he seem very knowledgeable about the United States? Did he have any special interests? (I said he liked hunting.) What did he say about girl friends? Did he express himself in any way about his job? Was he overworked? Underworked? Bored? Tired? Did he need money? Et cetera. We went over the same ground several times, each time with different footwork.
“I guess it’s a blind alley,” I said at last.
“That seems to be your unshakable opinion,” the man said. He was annoyed. “Did it occur to you that you may have done a disservice to your friend as well as to us by not really pursuing the matter as we agreed?”
“Of course,” I said.
We sat in silence for a while. I thought he was trying to think up some new way to get at me, but finally he just asked what my expenses had come to. I said I’d skip the expenses.
“I’d just as soon you didn’t,” he said. “It makes the record sloppy. How far did you drive?”
“Seventy miles or so,” I said. “Round trip.”
“Beyond the thirty-mile limit?” he said.
“No,” I said, and explained. He shrugged and counted out some cash for the driving expenses. He said he’d be in touch if necessary.
During the next day I didn’t think too much about it all. I thought I’d adroitly made myself as neutral as possible over something that could be forgotten.
The day after that I had a sudden fit of thinking I’d been wrong. Maybe the man was right. Maybe he knew much more than I did about Pavel’s wanting to come over and I was the only way to contact Pavel, but he couldn’t trust me with the whole story.
But then I thought Pavel would surely have spoken to me. He knew me; he was a friend of mine. Of course, institutions, I thought, even in this country, know more than friends. I had a friend at Yale, a graduate student, whose girl friend found out he was going to propose to her when she saw, by chance, his application for renewal of his research grant. He’d asked for more money, and explained to the foundation that he was going to get married. She said nothing. When he got the money he asked her to marry him. She wasn’t mad that the foundation knew before she did. She knew that that’s how life is nowadays.
I balanced all these thoughts by thinking I’d been deceitful with Pavel, that one of the few values I still imagined myself holding had to do with friendship, with being truthful in friendship. I realized that I hadn’t ever been put in a position where I had to examine what I meant by friendship. All I’d ever had to do was put a drunk to bed, vote for a friend’s membership in a club, go to weddings. I hadn’t even had to lend anyone more than twenty dollars.
The third day, I decided that on the basis of the past week my life was gray and feeble. I realized I should have resolved to play it out all the way. I became obsessed with garish, disruptive possibilities. No matter which way Pavel was working, I should have hired a girl to seduce him, offered him stock in General Motors, a plane ticket to Rio. Asked him to rob a bank. Anything to see in his face what was in his mind. I wanted to find out things just for myself. To have some interest—even some duplicity—of my own.
Even when I subsided and was working quietly along on my H.E.W. chores, I would suddenly think that at the very least I should have asked Pavel to confide in me—offered to explain my own small part—exchanged my own fabulous lies for his fabulous lies, some invention of what I was for his invention of what he was. At least that—at the very, very least.
But I subsided even further. I began to guess that the only value at the bottom of my life was preservation of a personal status quo. Me in my right place. I was apparently ready to work for twenty years—or, as they used to say around the office, work
for one year twenty times.
But after a week of yearning for turbulence and revelation, the automatic pilot of my life kept me routine. It took a special effort to lift the phone and call Pavel at home. I was even relieved when there was no answer. But I kept calling regularly until I had worked up enough frustration to call the Soviet Embassy the next day. They said he wasn’t in—to try the consular affairs number. I did. They said there to call the embassy number. I did. They asked me to leave my name and number and said he would call when available. He didn’t. I called again the next day. Same runaround. I went to his apartment. No one home. I left a note. Next day still no response. I had my secretary dial the embassy number while I dialed the consular affairs number. They both said to call the other number. I said to the embassy that I was connected to the consular number and that the consular people said to call them. There was a silence. Then they gave a third number. I called that. A man answered and said to call the other two numbers.
“No,” I said. “I’ve just called them.”
Silence. “Who do you wish?” I told him again. Silence. Then a conversation aside in Russian. The man said, “Not available.”
“Oh, well,” I said, “I’ll leave a message.”
“Not available,” the man said. “Not available on a permanent basis.”
“What does that mean?” I said, but he hung up.
For a moment I assumed that it meant something dire. I couldn’t think of anything to do, of course. I didn’t know how to get hold of my contact from the other agency. What could he do anyway? Raid the Soviet Embassy?
My secretary went out for lunch. I stayed at my desk thinking. I kept lapsing away from the problem into all my other thoughts—thoughts about what my yearning for disruption meant to me or about me. I began to feel that my mind had suddenly become double-jointed. I began to have a yearning for the boring competence I’d developed over the past three years, and then, like the coils of a Slinky toy going down a flight of stairs, my thoughts would flip over and be about how to cut loose from it all.
Pavel came into the office. “Farewell, farewell,” he said, “unless you haven’t had lunch yet.”
“I thought you were supposed to be in trouble,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “What have you been doing?”
“I’ve been trying to call you.”
“You were worried about me?” he asked.
“Of course I was.”
“Then you are not yet completely dead as a human being,” he said.
“What’s going on? What are you doing? Where are you going?”
“To Paris,” he said. “Don’t you think that’s nice?”
“I thought you’d done something bad,” I said.
“Perhaps I have,” he said, “and Paris is my reward.”
“Be serious,” I said. “I wish you’d tell me exactly what’s going on.”
“Come have lunch,” Pavel said. “I want to eat a crab before I leave.”
We took a cab up to a restaurant by the National Theater and had crabs.
“This is a perfectly normal move, then,” I said. “You’re just getting on in the world.”
“Yes,” he said. “This is still all my career.”
“I didn’t mean just that,” I said. “I thought you’d gotten mixed up in something important. I mean, what were you doing here, really?”
“I’m surprised that you still want to know the mechanics of things,” he said. “I mean for yourself. You would be bored. Truthfully. The mechanics of things are a bad novel you read when you cannot sleep. You do not want to remember them and you spend time thinking about them anyway. That is really all you should know about that. Now let me tell you something else.”
I didn’t know about all that. I said that if he were to tell me anything he didn’t want me to talk about, he could be sure I would keep a promise to him just as well as any promises I made to institutions. I said I just wanted to know about him.
“It would give me great satisfaction to build a city,” he said, ignoring what I had just said. “Or to grow a forest. But I will not. Nor you. We are enmeshed. The most exalted feelings we will have will be on the day of marriage, of the birth of a child, of a peaceful time. That small fraction of our lives will be the only time our bodies will be full of blood and alive. The rest of the time is for mechanics—and bad jokes about how dull we are. We are not artists or leaders. When I was young I wanted to be as triumphant and right as Lenin. Then—a little older—I wanted every moment of my life to be as full and right, in another way, as when I first began to see paintings in museums. I thought I could feel life at all times as though it were painted by Cranach, Rembrandt, Matisse. But afterward I saw that of my life, that is the smallest fraction of all. Triumph and rightness—whether of Lenin or Matisse—are not possible. They are not my possibility. And that is why I am content to cultivate these small fractions of life that mean something to me. It is not possible to find the whole. Why? I will tell you. Ever since men learned to throw stones, most of us have been at a distance from the rest of life. There are very few who can do anything but keep backing away with their stones. That is why I am content with the fractions of time when that is not so. For example, the day at your farm was a fraction about which I am very satisfied. And yet you still wish to know everything, because you still believe that life is not fractions, that people are not fractions to each other. I will tell you—no matter what I would explain to you, you will not know more than a fraction. Isn’t that right? You know that I am right.”
I said I didn’t know.
“Well, it isn’t something to complain about,” he said. “I am not complaining. I just came to say goodbye. One would-be mandarin to another.”
We left the restaurant and walked until he found a cab.
“Maybe I’ll be able to come see you in Paris,” I said.
“That would be nice, of course,” he said.
He went off in the cab, and I walked down Pennsylvania Avenue past the Justice Department. It was true that I had been sure, in a prosaic way, that knowing more about anything or anyone, I would be able to embrace more, unite more in myself, and blend my virtues and accomplishments into a whole that was in turn part of a larger whole of everyone’s virtues and accomplishments. I had assumed that the proper arranging of things in the world was something that I could become a part of to the point where everything that went right, that was brought into its place, would give me satisfaction.
That is what I thought it was to be a mandarin. That was not what Pavel meant. What he meant was resignation to fractions—resignation to having to maneuver his life through what was unavoidably being done; resignation to rationing his pleasures, to restricting them to such bland and inert sharers as me; to admitting that, of the part of life that could still go on, these fractions were all he would ever loose his natural feelings toward.
As for myself, in several ways I had divided the world into compatible, even mutually attractive, halves. Theirs and ours, to name just one set. Or the urge to be spontaneous and disruptive and free (without personal consequences) and the satisfaction of being an agent of benefit (without inflicting anything that anyone could say was not good).
I’d always had a balanced view. I’d always felt I could be within reach of both halves of everything.
But by the time I got to the horses on the Capitol side of the Federal Trade Commission I was giving in. I think I had been planning to walk by them because I’d run into Pavel there, and also because they stood for all the convergences I’d expected in my own life or in the way the world was meant to go. I had even worked out such elaborate similes as the likeness of the way I’d hoped to see with how a horse sees, an eye on each side. But when I got there, all this conscious and optimistic symbolism gave way. It was all in pieces. I remembered thinking that, as a last comfort, as a last justification, I had always been able to think of myself as a federal workhorse. That had been sweetly imaginary.
I’d thoug
ht my ambitions were safe because they were so orthodox and modest. But those notions of duty, labor, and what couldn’t be called anything but good weren’t really the ambitions of a person. And as for personal ambitions, I really hadn’t even hoped for as much as Pavel had. And there we were, both settled in. Not even as workhorses. We were less like horses than like the flies that follow them. Bottle-green mandarin flies following the federal horses, who aren’t people, after all. And we could stare with flies’ multiple-prism eyes at all that might be going on or not, but what we ended up seeing for ourselves was fractions, repeated and repeated, from which we could subtract the few that made up our small personal lives.
CONNAISSANCE DES ARTS
MISS HOGENTOGLER WAS A WAITRESS at the Huddle, where I ate a late breakfast after composition class, before I went to my drama class at noon. We had a half hour alone three days a week.
At first I told Miss Hogentogler all the clever things I’d heard when I was in college. She was enchanted by the East—by the East she meant Boston and New York. She wished to be thin, beautiful, and wicked. Later that year she did become beautiful.
She had fine brown hair, a high broad forehead, a large mouth, but with enough bone in her chin and cheeks to carry it off. But it was wishing that changed her. Or perhaps she was always beautiful and I finally saw it.
During the fall I thought she was foolish and cute. She loved to have long talks. She prepared for them—but not in order to dominate them. Toward the end she would droop with submissive yearning: “Oh, Mr. Hendricks, I had no idea it was so complicated.”
Miss Hogentogler loved to hear stories of elegant meanness, stories in which people’s feelings were crushed by a single word. I quickly ran through the famous lines: Whistler to Oscar Wilde; George Bernard Shaw about his American publisher; John Wilkes’s famous zeugma (Mr. Interlocutor to Mr. Wilkes: You, sir, will die either on the gallows or of a horrible venereal disease. Mr. Wilkes: That depends, sir, on whether I embrace your political principles—or your mistress). I think I remembered some Rochefoucauld and some Voltaire.
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