Old Men at Midnight Page 13

  The opportunity to move, to act, to depend totally upon one’s skill and luck, came much sooner than I had anticipated. You quickly realize that you can get the guards accustomed to your odd comings and goings. Who would dare to question the movements of Colonel Leonid Shertov, the right arm of General Razumkov, himself the right arm of the possible future Boss? You have your car, which on occasion you now drive alone, ready at all times. You have a map, food, a versatile knife, heavy-duty wire clippers, civilian clothes, good hiking boots. You wait for a night of the worst kind of weather, lashing rain, mist, fog, wind. You know the exact hour before the change of the border guards, when they’re most weary, least alert. You know where to ditch the car, what roads to avoid. You mime the rise and fall of the ground with your body as you run in the rain through fields and forests. You lie flat in puddles of muddy water, ford cleansing streams, are drenched to the skin by the chilling rain.

  I had told my office that I was experiencing a recurrence of my fever and headache and would probably be sleeping late. I don’t know when it finally dawned on them that they now had a headache of their own.

  East Germany to Czechoslovakia to West Germany.

  I emerged from a forest beyond a village road and crossed in a deluge of rain two hours before dawn.

  The West Germans and Americans listened with interest to what I had to say. I was not the first to cross over—nor the last.

  There was no doubt a big noise made about it in Moscow and a lot of talk concerning enemies of the people and how one can never trust Jews. But they probably forgot about me when East Germany exploded with violent demonstrations a short while later. Our minister, blamed for that, was either shot or strangled at a meeting of the Politburo—that was the word I got, though the world heard about a trial.

  I don’t know what happened to General Razumkov.

  Now let me say this, though it would not surprise me if it cannot enter the hearts of those who suffered at my hands. All the anguish I caused others in my zealous protection of that once splendid dream; all the emptying of hope and civilization I inflicted upon those who stood before me; all the many questions I asked as an act of wounding and all the answers I received through another’s screaming; all the worlds I permanently altered in the hearts and minds of people—for all those deeds and a great many more, I uttered, as I stepped into freedom, a Russian word, “Proschay,” which means “Good-bye forever.” And also means “Forgive me.”

  For a long time afterward I wondered who had moved into my Moscow apartment and what had become of my painting of the village.

  The fever and the headaches? An intestinal parasite I picked up during my months with the Red Army in the Crimea.

  “Treatable,” says my American doctor, “but not curable.”

  It comes and goes. It is tenacious, like memory.

  THE TROPE

  TEACHER

  1

  That melancholy April, two weeks after Benjamin Walter’s wife fell ill, a woman moved into the Tudor on the other side of the rhododendron hedge. The postman, the gardener, and the owner of the local bookstore made it a point to inform him that the woman was the noted writer I. D. Chandal. Benjamin Walter, preoccupied with scholarship and in the midst of struggling for months with his memoirs, had little time for fiction. But he knew the name I. D. Chandal.

  He was sixty-eight, and ailing. A tall, lean, stately man, with thick gray hair, a square pallid face split by a prominent nose, and large webbed eyes dark with brooding behind old-fashioned gold-rimmed spectacles. His long, large-knuckled fingers swollen at the joints, the dry, papery hands flecked with age spots; his lips thin and turned down at the corners; his body fragile, bones prone to breaking.

  At times, in the company of intimate friends, he referred to the memoirs as his deathwork.

  Much to his wonder and disquiet, when he’d begun the task of remembering his early years he discovered that his zone of deep memory was, as he put it to himself, well fortified and resistant to frontal assault. Only reluctantly did it begin to yield to determined probing, surrendering now and then a tiny territory of uncertain value: a narrow city street deep in snow; a parental voice quivering with anger; a man’s pale eggplant features spectrally detached from name and frame; a wisp of odd melody curling and fleeting as a morning mist. He barely recognized those fragments from his past, was unable to locate what he single-mindedly sought and uncovered in his scholarly tunnelings: the linking trails of cause and effect; the cords of connection, as he labeled them, that invariably led him to a unified chronicle.

  He would sit in his oak-and-leather desk chair or lie back on his worn recliner, brooding, searching, writing, discarding. He had for fifty years not reflected much about his very early past, believing always that he could retrieve it with ease. How very disconcerting, the obsidian face that it now presented to him.

  Especially as memory was what he was best known for; most notably, his remembering of war. War was his subject: war in general, the two world wars in particular. He was foremost among the sociologists of war, celebrated, esteemed. His monographs were studied in universities throughout the world, at West Point, in the Pentagon. Put to him an inquiry about the rise of the knightly class in Europe, and he would trace it to nomadic incursions from the steppes and to Viking raids; about the causes of the fall of Constantinople to Muhammad II in 1453, and he would connect it to the horrors of the Fourth Crusade 250 years earlier; about the rise of the cannon and firearm, and he would begin a discourse on the crossbow, its stock and recoil; about the connection in the First World War between tranquil English town, hamlet, club, and pub to the ghastly stench and slaughter near Ypres, Wytshaete, and Messine, and he would respond with a lecture on the speed of the British postal service. Query him on these and similar matters of war, and you received unambiguous replies delivered in the rhythms and accents of exquisite Oxford English, with not the vaguest trope to indicate his New York beginnings.

  His current reputation was vast; his embryonic years clouded. Information found in the usual brief biographies of notables yielded only bare bones: born in New York City in the 1920s; a void about his early years; then, in the Second World War, to England, France, and Germany with the American army; a decision to remain in England after the war; a bachelor’s, master’s, and doctorate from Oxford; marriage to an English woman of the aristocracy; scholarly articles and reviews for estimable American and international journals of sociology and military studies; a member of various august scholarly societies; abrasive essays in the New Republic and the New York Review of Books; the first major work, published when he was thirty-five, Clausewitz and War: The Birth of the Battle of Annihilation; and seven more books, among them the much-honored The Triumph of Thanatos: War in the Twentieth Century and the disputatious Why So Late: America’s Entry into the Second World War. And his return to the United States.

  Now, in near-old age, perpetually in the limelight, regularly approached, noted, quoted. In Time, Newsweek, and Vanity Fair, he was the Professor of War. The reason, no doubt, behind the New York Times report, in its “Friday Book Notes” column, of the impressive six-figure advance for his memoirs, and the widespread anticipation of their appearance.

  In the third week of that unhappy April he sat laboring at his desk one morning, his wife ill in the adjoining room, the nurse at her side, and after a futile inroad into early memory, he raised his weary eyes and gazed out the window at the rhododendron hedge that was part of the border between his home and the Tudor, and saw I. D. Chandal, the new owner of the neighboring house. From a distance of about forty feet his weary eyes let him see narrow hips garbed in tight dark-blue jeans, and breasts covered by a light-blue, short-sleeved jersey. She stood gazing at the hedge, looking surprisingly young and trim for a woman said to be in her middle years.

  He put down his pen and closed his eyes. Nothing was happening with the work that morning. Barren wells, puerile words. Might as well meet the new neighbor, clear the head of the long night
’s frequent wakings.

  He informed the nurse that he was stepping outside for a while. Fresh air, a walk in the woods. His wife lay asleep, breathing shallowly. White hair uncombed on the white pillow; beads of sweat on her pale forehead and cheeks; bluish half-moons under her eyes. She lay diminished, her chest nearly flat. Once robust, moist, and wondrous with love in bed. His heart throbbed with grief. How recapture the past when the present exhausted him so?

  But no, he told himself as he left the house and started along the flagstone path to the lawn and the hedge, it was not the accursed illness that had drawn up the blockade to memory; it was something—and here the warm air of the sunny morning fell upon his eyes and face—no, someone, some being from the past itself, a creature elusive as waning shadows and morning mist.

  Well, he thought, approaching the figure by the hedge and feeling the heat of the late-morning sun rising from the young spring grass on the lawn, she is a good-looking woman, indeed. Change of neighbor, change of luck?

  The hedge was about thirty feet in length, extending from the tall spiked wrought-iron front fence to nearly halfway up the lawn. Beyond the hedge the lawn ran smooth and straight, vanishing into the shadowy dead-leaf interior of dense woods. Three or four feet deep, the rhododendron hedge was situated on a section of the border line between the two properties, and I. D. Chandal stood on the Walter side, peering intently into its leafy interior, her back to Benjamin Walter. Close up, a woman small and dainty in stature, jeans tight, without the revealing curve of panties, he couldn’t help noticing; sandals and thin ankles and bare toes; he felt the beat and drum of his blood.

  She must have sensed his approach, for she straightened and turned. He noticed immediately the bony shoulders and small, firm breasts and the nipples beneath the blue jersey. She was not wearing a brassiere. Pretty face, oval-shaped, high cheekbones, blue inviting eyes. How old is she? Forties? Fifties? Face astonishingly unlined. How long has Evelyn been teaching her work? Five years, maybe longer.

  A singular fragrance, richly sweet and warm, rose from the hedge. Strange. These rhododendrons have never before given off a scent. More likely blowing in from the woods behind the house. Trees and wildflowers stirring and the two water oaks budding and the grass in the cemetery rising after the storms of the winter.

  “Good morning, Ms. Chandal,” he said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “No, no. Not at all.”

  “I saw you through my study window and decided to come down and welcome you to the neighborhood.”

  “Why, thank you,” she said, and added, “Professor Walter.”

  A demure smile. Lovely Cupid’s-bow lips. And the smooth face so white, set off by blond hair in a pageboy cut. And a long slender neck, white, alabaster white.

  “Ah,” he said, with a slight bow.

  “Those who informed you about me informed me about you.” A throaty voice, musical.

  “We are a close-knit community.”

  “And gossipy.”

  “Gossip is a way communities protect their values.”

  “I remember reading that in one of your books. Was there gossip on the street when the Tudor fell vacant?”

  “It was expected to be a difficult house to sell. Indeed, it stood empty for more than a year.”

  “It’s vast. I love it.”

  “You live in it alone.”

  “Entirely alone. And relish it.”

  “Never married?”

  “Once married. A recent mutual parting. Two children, grown, long gone from the nest. And you?”

  “Married, three children. My wife is home ill.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. About your wife, I mean.”

  “Otherwise she would have brought you some of her English things by way of welcome. Cakes she likes to bake, and teas. She is from England. Does literature. Formerly at Oxford, now at Princeton. She teaches your books. Big fan, as they say.”

  “I’m flattered.” A faint crimson tide rising to the white cheeks, a diffident smile, averted eyes.

  “I regret I read no fiction these days, experiencing a bit of a bottleneck with my own work, my memoirs, difficulty locating certain memories tucked away, you might say, tucked away somewhere quite deep. Do you encounter similar problems on occasion?”

  She turned her eyes fully upon him. Almond-shaped, with a dark gaze. “On occasion? No.”

  “Ah.”

  “Always.”

  “Always?”

  “Incessantly.”

  “And how does one manage under the circumstances?”

  “One sits and ponders.”

  “Ah, my dear Ms. Chandal. If I could tell you of the hours I have spent sitting and pondering—”

  “Relentlessly, pitilessly.”

  “Yes, indeed.”

  “Pondering, probing, prying.”

  “Ms. Chandal—”

  “Please. We’re neighbors. We’ve been engaged in conversation now for more than, what, five minutes. Call me Davita.”

  “Well. Indeed. Davita. And you must call me Benjamin.”

  “Benjamin.”

  “The hours I have spent at my desk—”

  “Try talking. You know, the way you learn a language. Out loud. Tell it to the air. See how it begins to unravel.”

  “It is more like attacking a fortress.”

  “Memory is like a ball of woolen thread, Benjamin. If the pen cannot unravel it, the voice can. All my books are unravelings of voice and pen. Would drive my poor husband to distraction, not to mention the children. They thought I had multiple personalities. A loony wife and mother. He’s a very uncomplicated man, my Donald. I would’ve left him sooner but for the kids. He owns a headstone business. For graveyards. Very fancy carving, and very expensive. Benjamin, I think you’re standing too long in the sunlight. It’s nice to have met you. May I shake your hand?” She rubbed her right palm on her jeans. “A bit grubby with earth, I’m afraid. Sizing up a flower bed.”

  Fingers short, slender, dry. Tendons ridged along the underside of the thin wrist. Smooth.

  “You write by hand, I see,” she said, gently turning his hand as it lay against hers and rubbing the tip of a finger over the small hillock of callus on the first joint of his middle finger. He felt her finger through the dry mound of dead skin. “Same thing with me.” She showed him a callused finger.

  “Everything, monographs, letters, books.”

  “Your Why So Late I read in college and wrote a term paper on it. Memorable. The book, I mean.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Your account of the final German offensive. Frightful.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Were you there?”

  “Oh yes, I was certainly there.”

  “Benjamin, you’re perspiring, you should go inside. First really hot day, beware too much noonday sun. I will invite you and your wife over one day soon.”

  He looked toward the woods behind the house and at the cemetery visible through the trees. The air thrumming with birdsong.

  “I doubt my wife will be able to join us.”

  “I’m genuinely sorry.”

  In another month the trees will shield the cemetery from view. The sun on the Revolutionary War gravestones, white, sparkling.

  “I believe that there is always a ram in the bush,” he heard her say.

  He turned to face her. Small white expectant features. Wide unblinking eyes overlaid with a transparent yellowish film flecked with pinpoints of golden light, probably from the sun. A serpent’s eyes, they almost seem. The eyes of a story writer?

  “A ram in the bush, you say.”

  “I believe that.”

  “How very nice to think so.”

  The following day he flew to Chicago. A graduate seminar on Clausewitz; an interview with the Op-Ed page editor of the Tribune; a private lunch with two deans and the provost; an afternoon colloquium on the Persian Gulf War.

  High piercing noises emanated from the speakers and rendered
the large audience restive. He stood helpless behind the podium. Why am I here? Why am I doing this? A sudden vision of his house, his study, and the rhododendron hedge in the sunlight. The nurse waiting patiently until he returned. Once again he spoke into the microphone, but it hurled back his words in fierce electronic resistance. He leaned heavily against the podium, his legs aching, a twinge in his right arm below the elbow. Bones beginning to hurt. When did I take the medication? A scruffy ponytailed young man in slovenly jeans hurried down the aisle and onto the stage, and checked plugs, wires, outlets. Proper sound and order restored, the audience again focused on him. Benjamin Walter spoke for an hour, detailing his position on the war, his voice a rich baritone, his tone properly ironic and dry, his Oxford English echoing faintly off the high walls of the crowded auditorium. He invoked Weber, Durkheim, Freud; he cited Churchill, Fussell, Janowitz. He analyzed roots and causes and drew tight the cords of connection. Nevertheless, during the question-and-answer period, contentious voices were raised: Was this not antiquated gunboat diplomacy? Regressive, imperialist, colonialist, favoring oil interests and decadent regimes? How could he be so certain of the causal lines he had drawn up when one might easily see it this or that other way? Why did there have to be cogent causal lines at all, why could it not all simply have, well, happened? Someone cited Kuhn; another, Rorty. He felt himself growing weary. This young generation, nothing sacred to them, reduce everything to a postdeluvian shambles. He held his own, he thought, gave far better than he received, he was certain, and afterward one of the younger faculty, a bright assistant professor of English, who knew Evelyn’s work on Virginia Woolf and I. D. Chandal, accompanied him to the university bookstore and then drove him to the airport.

  Seated in the airliner, the huge jet airborne, he removed from his briefcase the collection of stories he had purchased in the bookstore, the most recent book by I. D. Chandal. Its title, Calling Upon Hell, and the photograph on the back of the dust jacket displaying an I. D. Chandal quite different from the one he had met near the hedge: gray-haired, plump, wearing a man’s shirt and tie, a tweed sports jacket, dark slacks, and with a strange fierce look in her eyes. Round-faced, heavy-bosomed, the early traces of a second chin, tiny lines biting at her lips. The jacket unable to conceal the hefty endowment of hip and thigh. Apparently, between the book and the hedge she had dyed her hair and lost a lot of weight.