The American Ambassador (2 page)

They were meeting embassy people. A German joined us later. Herr Kleust worked in the Foreign Ministry, and they'd known him in Africa. I vaguely remembered him, because I was very young at the time. He was with the ambassador during the incident in Africa. The ambassador always maintained that Herr Kleust saved his life. So when they meet they always throw their arms around each other. Grunts and backslapping, old comrades that they are. The ambassador wipes away a tear while his wife looks at them, shaking her head. They are speaking rapid German. The ambassador calls him my-dear-friend-who-came-in-at-the-end-of-everything. A reference to something in the past, I have no idea what it is.

There are the three of us, two embassy people, and, later, Kleust. I'm certain that one of the embassy people was the chief spy. I had his name, but who knows if it's his real one. They're interchangeable parts, the spies. This one looked about thirty years old, except you knew he was fifty. Smooth complexion, short hair, cleft chin, looked like he stepped out of the window of J. Press, a trust-fund English professor at Yale. Melville and the Lake Poets. He was one of the old boys, the new ones aren't so smooth. Southern accent, young wife. His German was perfect. They were talking about the great crisis, switching back and forth between English and German, using euphemisms, code words, metaphors, probably to confuse me.

“We had too many men on the ice,” J. Press said. “There should have been a cut in the squad five, six months ago.”

“Try three years,” the ambassador said.

They were drinking a lot of wine and halfway through the entrée the ambassador began to talk about the White House, and how incompetent they were.
Assholes
, he said; and here I thought he'd meant the Revolutionary Guards. The ambassador is full of surprises. The spy took offense, only President we've got, give him our full support, tough decisions, hate to be in his shoes, oh bruthah. That plantation accent. The ambassador changed the subject, and then they were talking about the latest scandal, the one that hadn't gotten into the newspapers—not yet! Some FSO ran off with counterpart funds and his secretary and was in Brazil, where no one could get at him. They were talking about what a mild-mannered fellow he was, pussy-whipped all those years by his wife, and what a shame, etcetera etcetera. Class alliance. Foreign Service Protective Association.

Kleust walked in then and he and the ambassador went through their comrades-in-arms act. The German didn't say much, just sat and listened. He was almost bald, with a heavy, dour face. Herr Kleust displayed little on the surface, except to smile when the ambassador would reach over and punch him on the arm.

They began to talk about the difference between American and European scandals. Some of the scandals I'd never heard of, but the idea seemed to be that the Europeans were tempted by ideology and sex, the Americans by money. The Americans used to be tempted by ideology but ideology had no meaning for today's American. Uh-huh. They had a fine time talking about scandal. The great continuum of scandal, scandal through the ages. The spy, half drunk at the end of dinner, put a cigar in his tight little mouth and talked for fifteen minutes, his Yale lecture. How inevitable it all was. Scandal inevitable. War inevitable. Error inevitable. Life in the West. The imperfectability of man. The long twilight struggle, sigh. Oh, the spy was saying, we've seen it all. Nothing new under the sun for us, loyal civil servants. We've been around forever. Got to take the long view, ha-ha. It was a disorderly world, filled with troublemakers.

“Americans,” I said.

He looked at me. “What?”

“Most of the trouble is made by Americans.”

He looked at the ambassador, eyebrows elevating.

The ambassador said,“My son has the idea that his countrymen are not letter-perfect.”

“Let us hear what he has to say.” That was Herr Kleust, speaking in German.

“Vietnam, I suppose,” J. Press said.

“Palestine and Iran,” I said.

He continued as if he hadn't heard me; he probably hadn't. He was not the sort of spy who
listened.
He was too fond of his own theories. For Americans, especially young Americans, Vietnam stood in the way of the horizon. It stood in the way of history. It was a tumbril in Constitution Avenue. But you don't have to worry about it, he said; it won't ever happen again. “Americans won't ever again believe, the way those Americans believed. Two centuries of belief ended in Indochina. Of the people, by the people, and for the people; that all ended, too. Follow me. That ended. I thought a kind of class warfare would begin, but it didn't. So the belief in justice: that ended, too.”

“Is that what you think?” Herr Kleust said.

“Absolutely,” J. Press said.

“I meant the young man.” The German smiled coldly at me. He had not taken his eyes off me and now he said softly, “The trouble in Palestine and Iran is caused by the Americans?”

Herr Kleust had no interest in Indochina; he had no more interest than I did, though for different reasons.

“Can we get off this?” the ambassador said, pulling a long face. He signaled the waiter for another round of schnapps.

“Yes,” Mother said. “Let's, please.”

But it was between Kleust and me. I said, “And the Germans.” He said, “I see.”

“In Palestine,” I added, in case he had failed to get the point. I knew he hadn't. He wasn't that kind of German.

“Of course,” he said. “The Germans also.”

“The German people . . .” J. Press said. He began to bluster again, his plantation accent thicker and more disgusting. Yet I listened to him; he was not a stupid man, obviously. The Americans are dangerous because they are so easily underestimated. They seem to skim over the surface of things, and their listeners forget that that is often where things
are
, on the surface. He was off now on a tour of twentieth-century horrors, and how the Germans were not responsible for all of them. Most talented people in Europe, etcetera. The hardest-working. The most dynamic economy, etcetera. I tuned out then. I think that Herr Kleust did, too. I watched them talk and said nothing further. Eventually they returned to their discussion, the great crisis, and scandal; sex, money, and ideology. World-weary Americans are amusing, in the way that an adolescent in a three-piece suit and a fedora is interesting. So: the corruption of sex, ideology, and money, and nothing to be done about it, human nature being what it is. Old as mankind, old as the hills. The secret, according to the spy, was not to be surprised. You couldn't allow yourself to be
surprised.

And then this idea came to me. I began to smile, thinking of it—that if someone had said, Hey, baby, have you heard the news? The
Post
had a piece about it. They're burning folks out at Chevy Chase. Built a couple of ovens right next to the country club, eighth tee, going full-out, every day, every night, burning niggers! This asshole would listen and say, Well, waaaaaiiit a minute. We've heard all this before! That's nothing new! What about Belsen and Auschwitz? What about Dachau? Let's have a little perspective here!

 

We were the last ones out of the restaurant. It was midnight but the port was busy, the Germans being talented, hard-working, and dynamic. The whores were at their stations, but began to drift in our direction when we appeared on the street. I swear to God, angel, one of them was carrying a teddy bear. The ambassador and Herr Kleust were talking, their arms around each other's shoulders. My mother and the other embassy person stood huddled in the doorway. The whores came in closer. I was reminded of animals circling a garbage dump. The spy nudged me. He said, “Best-looking whores in the world, in Hamburg. Better'n Marseille or Singapore, or Saigon in the old days. You get a minute, you ought to go to Saint Pauli, just for the hell of it. Look, don't touch. There're fifty-seven varieties of clap in Hamburg.” He laughed loudly and made a motion with his hands, and the whores were suddenly alert. I was sick of him, his arrogance and presumption, and was about to reply when he walked away, looking for the cars. One of the whores was staring at me and I smiled and shook my head. They began to back off, into the shadows. I could hear the clanking of gears behind me, a ship being off-loaded. The air was gummy with salt and oil.

They were standing together now, the ambassador and his wife and Herr Kleust. She was in the middle. They had their arms around each other, talking with animation, their breath pluming in the tart air. So happy to see each other again. She looked from one to the other, laughing. The ambassador had made a joke. Herr Kleust replied, the occasion for more laughter. She gave them each a peck on the cheek. Then they became grave, and I knew they were talking about the great crisis. I heard the ambassador say, God, sometimes he's so difficult. So it was me they were talking about. They moved off into the shadows, arms around each other.

You know the port of Hamburg, its noise and its energy, ships from every port in the world. Listening to it, I knew what I was going to do. I waved at them, and said I would walk back to the Prem. The ambassador said it was too far, and too cold. I said I needed the air, and did not mind the cold. I was very excited. I hurried away down the dark street. There was a whore in every doorway, sometimes I saw only a face or a flash of skirt. Naturally I heard their voices, harsh, coarse German. And I answered in kind, and heard their laughter.

I left the others standing on the sidewalk in front of the restaurant. Someone had brought the embassy car, its lights casting long shadows in front of me. I ducked into an alley and looked back at the ambassador and his wife. I thought they were suddenly frail, without substance or nerve. They were without force.

But as I told you, my parents are mediocre people.

In any case, I did not see them again for three years.

 

 

 

 

A
MBASSADOR NORTH'S
apprehension had begun with a pain in his wrist, noticed one afternoon while he was fishing offshore on Middle Ground, the boat tipping gently in the chop where the Sound's floor dropped abruptly from six to sixty fathoms. He thought the pain was caused by the oppressive southwest wind, the prevailing wind at the end of summer, blowing for days, humid and unnerving; the fishing was terrible. It was a noisy, surly wind, putting everyone on edge, even Elinor, who was usually unaffected by climate. He thought the wind was the New England version of the mistral or the tramontana, hot northern winds that agitated livestock and drove people indoors, unbalanced. But as it came from the southwest, it was related to the sirocco, the North African wind that swept the Mediterranean to oppress southern Europe. The southwest wind brought the damp Gothic humors of the American South, altogether foreign to the bony New England coast, Tennessee Williams seducing Cotton Mather.

Disorienting and perverse, the wind was ample cause for psychosomatic complaint. But when the wind stopped—it took twenty-four hours to do so, a torrential rain in the evening, then a slow swing around the compass until the next afternoon when, centered in the Maritimes, it moderated, becoming chilly and dry—the pain did not go away. His wristwatch and wedding band were tight on his skin. He joked that the metal was contracting, along with his shirt collars and trouser waistbands. This continued for a week.

Then one night at dinner he turned to laugh at something Elinor said—“You know, sometimes I like you as Jules and sometimes I like you as Jim, and tonight I'm in a Jules mood, how about you?”—and his cigarette dropped to the rug. They were finishing a fine conversation, the one they had every now and then: how exceptionally lucky they were in their choice of each other, what fun they had, how well their lives fit. This home leave, spent entirely at their cottage on Lambert's Cove, had been particularly tranquil and playful. The undertow was less charitable: and we haven't needed anyone else. How nice it's been, just us two. She'd said, “I can feel it coming on, another attack of the smugs. It's just as well we've only got a week left. Our home leave. Except it seems less and less like home. Is something burning?” He found himself staring at his two naked fingers poised comically half an inch from his mouth. His left hand was numb, inert as a piece of sculpture. The absence of pain was alarming and he drew back, the laughter dying, and put his hand in his lap, out of sight. Deep within him, something turned over but he forced his WASP's smile; his mother's smile, turning aside his father's Jewish frown. At times like these, you were thankful to be half-WASP. He sat very still, looking out the window at the lights across the Sound, beyond Middle Ground, the interval of the lighthouse beacon as regular as heartbeat. She said again, “Bill, what's burning?” He smiled an apology. The cigarette was smoldering on the rug. He picked it up with his right hand and stubbed it out, crushing it angrily into the ashtray—and went early to bed, though not to sleep.

In retrospect, all that seemed to carry significance, an irony of some kind, unintended consequence.

 

Lying in bed that night, he made a list of friends and their recent infirmities: herniated discs, prostate troubles, sciatica, hemorrhoids, and the disagreeable symptoms that announced them. In all these cases he had been consulted, a reliable, sympathetic, worldly friend, no stranger to hard times. Their wives had said to them, Talk to Bill North, he's been through the mill, no-nonsense Bill. He always listened carefully, then gave the obvious advice: See a doctor. And he would give them Brian Fowler's telephone number. But it was the time of life when no one wanted to see a doctor, for fear of what might turn up. It was fear of cancer. He always tried to make a mordant joke, for Christ's
sake
, we all drink too much, smoke too much, work too hard, exercise too little, it's a perfect profile and if we know one thing about our generation we know that nothing's predictable and that perfect profiles don't exist and won't apply. Talk to Fowler.