American Romantic (17 page)

You like the work, Sieglinde said.

I have a passion for it, Suzanne replied.

Digging things up.

Very old things.

What kinds of things?

A shard of pottery, Suzanne said. Something that may or may not have been a statue's kneecap. There's definitely something here. We just don't know what it is. What's interesting is the finding out. I'm not so sure about the colosseum. That's Ted's hunch. He likes to think big, Ted. That's an advantage because most everything we find is so small. It's good to have a goal if only as something to disprove. There was a sudden roar of laughter from the men, dice game over, Ted the loser.

Sieglinde looked up to find a plate of clementines, peeled and quartered, before her. The tall American, the one called Joseph, had said little during dinner, and now he looked at her and said, For you.

Sieglinde thought that the nicest gesture.

Thank you, she said.

My pleasure, Joseph said.

Sieglinde heard something in his voice, an irregularity, and asked, Where do you come from in America?

Joseph said he came from all over. He had started out in a small town in Wisconsin and went on to the university at Madison and after that the University of Chicago, trying to discover what it was he wanted to do with his life. At Chicago he became interested in archaeology and the work of Schliemann, his life and times, what some would call his banditry. Joseph wanted to learn how it was done, the identification of the place, and the digging itself. His first dig had been in Central America, not a very challenging dig. He went on about the dig in Central America, a Mayan dig that didn't disclose much, and fell silent. Sieglinde waited for him to continue but evidently he had said all he wished to say. She thought Joseph had an interesting face, skin pulled tight over his cheekbones, large ears, wavy brown hair, a forehead that seemed to rise to the heavens. He was slight of build. He had an open smile and a soft voice, so soft that it was easy to miss the irregularity, but to Sieglinde it was like a fist to the face.

The evening came to an end. Nightcaps were ordered and after a short discussion of the morning drill, all gear in the lobby by five-thirty a.m., coffee on the verandah, wheels up at six, the party broke up.

Suzanne walked Sieglinde to her room, Sieglinde silent.

Suzanne said, Is anything wrong?

Sieglinde said, That Joseph. He is not American.

Of course he's American. He's from Wisconsin.

I do not believe he is from Wisconsin.

I've known him for ages—

What is his age?

Joseph is—thirty? About thirty. He's a gifted scientist.

Sieglinde said nothing.

If he's not American, what is he?

He is German, Sieglinde said.

Why do you think so?

I can hear it in his voice. It's easy to miss, but it's unmistakable. The German language. When you listen carefully as I was doing.

That's the Wisconsin accent.

Wisconsin via Düsseldorf, Sieglinde said.

I can't hear it, Suzanne said.

It's German, definitely.

And does that make a difference?

Sieglinde was silent a moment.

Maybe it does, she said finally.

We have immigrants in North America, Suzanne said. We are a continent of immigrants. My grandfather came from Ireland. My great-grandfather, the other side, came from Holland. Some came over on the
Mayflower,
others arrived yesterday. So what?

You are right, Sieglinde said. It makes no difference.

But you are upset.

I was surprised, Sieglinde said.

He's very gifted, Suzanne said.

Yes, you said that.

You'll see, the way he goes about things.

Good night, Sieglinde said, and went to her room.

 

The dig was conducted not in the desert but on hardpan at the approaches to the desert. There was little vegetation and no trees above shoulder height. The terrain was flat, the line of sight extending for miles, the horizon a long thin line. Here and there were declivities but they were hardly noticeable. Sieglinde had never seen a country so bleak. The sun was already high when they arrived in the Land Rover, soon followed by a truck carrying the workmen. For a while no one moved. The heat was ferocious, boiling in the clear air, blue sky above. From time to time in the distance they would see a caravan, always, it seemed, moving east. Occasionally they would see a single camel and the camel's driver, a nomad going who knew where. Sieglinde was told they were likely Tuareg, inhabitants of the southern desert, an austere people who lived by their own mysterious rules and regulations. They seldom ventured north. The Tunisian workmen had constructed a lean-to with a canvas roof against the sun. Sieglinde stayed under it for most of the first day, getting used to the heat and blinding light. Soon enough a workman appeared with a wounded foot and twisted ankle. She had never seen skin so tough. It resembled old leather. She dressed the wound and wrapped the ankle, all the while looked at with high suspicion by the workman. Suzanne had told her to expect that. They do not trust women. They especially do not trust women doctors. Pay no attention, though it's difficult not to. They are from another century, these people. And, do you know what, we're the intruders.

They had stopped at a pharmacy on the way from Sfax and bought supplies, splints and surgical tape, iodine and other antiseptics, and a range of medicines that would treat snake and scorpion bites, though they had yet to see a snake. There were remedies also for gastric disturbances and headaches, which did seen to be epidemic.

Sieglinde thought of the archaeological patch as a place where time stopped. In the shimmer of midday nothing moved, not a leaf, not a twig. There was no wind. The earth did not stir. The sun made its indifferent transit and precisely at noon all work ceased with a clatter of tools and presently the plaintive cries of the faithful praising God. The workmen made their way to their tent and the archaeologists to theirs. They ate sparingly and went down for a nap and no matter how lethargic they were, sweat continued to rise and ooze down foreheads and chests. Often in the afternoon a fugitive breeze came up, not enough to stop the sweat but enough to moderate the heat a fraction. From the moment the breeze arrived—it was impossible to know its origin unless it was the hand of God Himself, so fervently prayed to by the faithful—time appeared to revive also, advancing at a pace so slow as to be barely noticeable, and in a moment forgotten. After the first few days Sieglinde found she liked the patch, the barrenness of the terrain, the heat, the absence of time passing. The outside world was over the horizon, unaccounted for. A good place to collect yourself, she decided, unlike Madagascar and its many demands. During the heat of the day no one spoke unless they had something to say of the work itself, the discovery of a pottery shard or a block of stone that may or may not have been part of a building's foundation. At dusk, the workmen returned to their village, the foreigners gathered under the tent, normal conversation begun once more. Sieglinde said little, preferring to listen to her new colleagues. She learned that Ted, along with being a genius at writing grant proposals, had private money of his own, so that if temporarily they came up short, he helped out. They had constant problems with bank drafts and the blizzard of numbers and cosignatures that accompanied them. Ted was the de facto leader of the entourage but did not insist on leading unless no one else wanted to. The Englishman Paul was much the best educated in their group, always hauling out a quote from Coleridge or Gibbon to brighten the cocktail hour. They called it, French-fashion,
un cocktail.
Paul's schoolmate Christopher was a pixie, vastly erudite but fond of dirty jokes and cockney rhyming slang. He also slept badly, often waking the group with groans and shouts that signaled a nightmare. Christopher was embarrassed and contrite but there was nothing he could do about the nightmares except to sleep away from the others, and that was deemed dangerous, one person alone in just a sleeping bag. So everyone put up with the nightmares and after a time became accustomed to them. Every few nights Christopher brought out his tape recorder, the latest model from New York, and played an opera.
La Bohème
and
Tosca
were his favorites but he also had tapes of
Norma
and
La Traviata
and Wagner's Ring cycle. Sieglinde thought it enchanting: drinking a gin and tonic in the dark and listening to opera, the quality surprisingly good. The evenings usually ended with an accounting of the events of the day, what was uncovered and the prospects for tomorrow. The pace was glacial but no one seemed to mind. Harry Sanders slipped further into the closet of her memory, threatening to disappear altogether—and then someone would make a remark that reminded her of him, and the door would open a crack, and close soon after. She wondered where he was and if he had found a new girl.

One night after the music, Joseph arrived at her side with two glasses of wine and asked her where she was from in Germany. She said, without enthusiasm, Hamburg, and Joseph nodded in a complicit manner and said, Berlin for me. Born in 1935, he said, the last good year. Good being a relative term, don't you agree? She said nothing to that, having no wish to discuss Germany. Joseph said his family actually lived in Potsdam, but he always thought of Potsdam as part of Berlin, only forty-five minutes on the S-Bahn. His father worked as an accountant at Babelsberg studios. He loved motion pictures and every once in a while would bring an actor or actress home for supper, one of the young ones living hand to mouth. My mother would roll her eyes and set places for them at the table, resigned to an evening of stories concerning the tribulations of the cinematic life. As if the tribulations were unique. I was so young, Joseph said, I remember them only vaguely. But even a child can apprehend glamour, and perhaps a child most of all. Don't you agree? My father was encouraged to join the Party so that his job would be secure. Of course by then Babelsberg was an arm of the Ministry of Propaganda. Some arm, Joseph said, sipping his wine, raising his eyebrows. They were sitting in camp chairs, Joseph leaning close to her, a little closer than she would have liked. He had a musty smell; she thought of it as the granular smell of the desert. His face was tanned to mahogany, his teeth white as milk. When he smiled, what she saw were teeth and deep creases either side of his mouth. She thought him handsome in an actorly way. His gestures seemed timed. He was certainly aware of himself and the effect he had on people. Women. He looked like a man who could take care of himself and whoever was with him. Still, he had come a little too close so she pulled her chair back a fraction and as she did so he smiled, perhaps a smile of apology, perhaps of something else. His easy assurance disarmed her. She heard the German language in everything he said; his
s
's were the giveaway. She liked his soft American voice and wondered if he missed his language. She had not spoken German since she had left the hospital ship and did not speak it now, but she heard it in his every word.

She said, And what then?

My father became a Nazi, Joseph said. He didn't wear the armband but I'd call that a detail. He loved Babelsberg, loved the craft, loved the people. I would say he loved the dreams that film people had. Film dreams were more real than their own dreams. Still are, I suppose. And everything went to hell soon after, including Babelsberg. The Soviets arrived, Ivans everywhere in Potsdam and Wannsee. What they did to women was unspeakable. The excuse was that the horrors of the eastern front had made them into brutes, scarcely human. What do you think? There's always an excuse. I saw a French documentary not long ago, the heroism of the Resistants. By this account, the Resistance made D-day possible. The Americans and the British lent valuable support to the Resistants in their successful liberation of Paris. Do you believe that? We live in a turnstile of lies.

Joseph lit a cigarette and blew a smoke ring.

So the Ivans came, he went on. By then I was living with my grandfather in a little village in the Black Forest, one narrow road in and the same road out. The war was far away. We were so remote, I don't remember seeing a single soldier, German, American, or Russian. And suddenly the war was over, and that was strange because in our village it had never truly arrived. People did not know what to think. Hitler was dead. Who would look after them now? I have no idea what happened to my parents. We Germans are unnaturally meticulous when it comes to recordkeeping. It's a kind of religion with us, don't you agree? Statistics of all sorts, no statistic too small to be noted, especially where human beings are concerned. Who died. Where they died. How they died. Our house in Potsdam was destroyed utterly and I assume my parents along with it. That was my grandfather's belief when he told me they were missing. But I have no idea, really. That is a blank space in the time of my life. We had relatives in Milwaukee and in 1947 I went to Milwaukee to live with them, an interminable voyage aboard a tramp steamer, and then a train to Chicago. They were kind people, older people in their sixties, not in the best of health, and I believe the last thing they wanted was a twelve-year-old boy with little English and very bad memories. But they were forgiving, and hospitable, and determined that I forget my German past and become a good American boy. I was told not to discuss the war, nor my father's work at Babelsberg. I was never under any circumstances to mention the Führer. Milwaukee was filled with Germans who had rapidly Americanized themselves, beginning before the Great War. Often they changed their names, the first step in assimilation. My aunt and uncle in Milwaukee went easily from Braun to Brown. They wanted to separate themselves from the old country, and who could blame them? But it was difficult for them, and for me, too. The accent was hard to lose. And if you liked pilsener and schnitzel, well, you liked pilsener and schnitzel instead of Coca-Cola and a hot dog. My aunt and uncle are dead now. They had no children of their own, only me. And I got out of Milwaukee as soon as I could. And I did not go back. So that's my story. And you?