American Romantic (2 page)

We've seen enough, the sergeant said. The helmsman nodded agreement.

Go back to the boat, Harry said. I want to look at the clinic close-up. I'll join you in five minutes.

Harry walked on alone. The dirt surround was immaculate, free of litter, not so much as a gum wrapper or cigarette stub. This was not normal. When he reached the clinic he called out but received no answer. He waited a moment, then stepped back when a figure appeared at the door. The light was failing but he recognized the village headman, a cloth bundle in his arms. He was filthy and the bundle was filthy. The headman stared straight ahead and if he noticed Harry he gave no sign. He moved his head and the cloth fell away to reveal a young girl. She was emaciated, skin drawn tight over her face and limbs. She was rigid in the headman's arms, her mouth agape. Harry asked if he could help but the headman said nothing. Perhaps he hadn't heard. He seemed to be in another realm altogether, a place of unassailable privacy. Harry took another step back, understanding now that he was not looking at a young girl but a middle-aged woman. The headman carried her as if she were light as a doll. He swayed, appearing to lose his footing, and suddenly sat on the top step of the clinic's verandah. And still he did not speak. The woman moved her fingers, searching for something. Her eyes were large and black as a doll's, without expression. She was surely near death. Harry was reminded of photographs of Nazi death camps and also of photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not at the time of the explosions but many months later, burned and radiated survivors cared for by their families or left to die alone. A shortage of beds. Never enough morphine. A photograph always put the viewer at a remove, present but not present. A photograph was only a piece of film paper, the result of a shutter's click from an invisible hand, though the most poignant did remain in the memory of anyone who saw it. Harry took another step back. He had no business there, yet he was drawn to the woman as if she were somehow kin. But they were not kin. They were mysteries to each other and he was an intruder, a minor official of the American government unable to offer anything of value, unless compassion had value and he doubted that it did. Compassion was only personal. He heard the sergeant call his name, the voice abrupt in the stillness of the moment. The clinic continued to smolder, almost extinguished now; he had no idea if others were inside. Harry had the thought that he was witnessing an event from the deep past, decades past, centuries, and he himself the unwelcome guest, uninvited, a voyeur come to observe the suffering, a simple bystander unable to supply even the most meager assistance—and then he stepped forward to ask the question, What happened here? But the headman paid him no attention and the woman closed her eyes. Her body shivered and seemed to wither, her limbs drooping as if made of putty. Harry had never watched someone die. She made no sound. The headman pulled a flask from the pocket of his jacket and put it to her mouth, still agape, the water spilling over her chin and falling to her chest, darkening the cloth tunic. The flask was empty and still the headman did not move in his observance of what surely was the last sacrament.

Harry! the sergeant called, his voice urgent. Then, softly, Get out of there now.

He stood quietly a minute longer, then stepped back once more. From the interior of the clinic a soldier in fatigues appeared, followed by three more. They wore forage caps that looked to be of U.S. Army issue and their faces were camouflaged with soot. They ignored the headman and the dead woman in his arms, indeed seemed as weary as soldiers anywhere after a long march. Their fatigues were filthy, torn in places. Their carbines were slung carelessly over their shoulders. They were young and three of the four wore wire-rim spectacles, giving them the appearance of students, except for the carbines, now unslung as one of them pointed his at Harry, standing alone twenty paces away. Harry thought they looked at him with curiosity, this tall American in khaki trousers and a blue polo shirt, as if he had just come from the terrace of some suburban country club. They wore no badges of rank, but the oldest, perhaps he was thirty years old, seemed to be the one in charge. The other three were looking at the headman and the dead woman without interest. Harry felt his left leg begin to twitch, the usual sign of nerves. He took one more step backward, his arms at his sides. The elder soldier had locked eyes with him, a frank challenge, daring him to make some move. Either that or something else. All this time in-country and he had never before seen the face of the enemy. This was in the hands of God, Harry thought. He was a believer but thought God was often distracted and careless, not someone to count on. God went His own way—certainly great, but cryptic also. Now the soldier raised his hand in warning but Harry paid no attention, taking a step backward once again. The soldier shouted something and raised his carbine but Harry paid no attention to that, either. He turned his back and walked slowly to the boat, his leg fluttering now like a butterfly wing. The soldier fired just once, the bullet whistling high overhead.

Jesus Christ, you idiot, the sergeant said when Harry reached the boat.

What are they doing now? Harry had his back to the village. The boat was under way.

I can't see them, the sergeant said. Crazy goddamned stunt you pulled. Get us all killed, you.

They weren't interested, Harry said. They had other things on their minds. I think it was a long day for them, too.

Yeah? How could you know that?

I knew it.

Even so—

Fuck you, Sergeant.

They motored west from Village Number Five. Harry stood in the stern, watching the village disappear, dusk coming on. In a few minutes they were around the bend in the river and the helmsman throttled back until they reached the point where the river narrowed sharply. Then he gave the little engine all the speed it could manage. The river opened up again but the helmsman did not slow the boat; and then it was dark except for the gibbous moon, lazy in the night sky. When the boat began to tremble and visibility went to pieces the helmsman throttled back once again. Harry saw flashes off the starboard side and realized someone was firing on them. But the distance was too great and the bullets went astray. He said nothing to the others, concentrating on the riverbanks ahead. Harry cupped his hands and lit a cigarette. He knew he would remember that village forever, the headman and his burden, the smoldering clinic, the nine shades of blue and his own disarray. His surprise when the soldiers appeared without warning, dirty faces, torn fatigues, carbines, wire-rim eyeglasses. He had the idea they were not skilled with weapons, and the carbine was about as low grade as weapons came. He himself had been in another realm, calm except for the twitch in his leg. And all that time the headman had not moved, seemed lost in reverie or grief. In this, Harry seemed to be the odd man out. His tour of duty in the war zone had one year to go and he supposed that, in good time, his heart would harden. A hard heart was evidence of maturity, a hard-won stoic ideal. The ability to put yourself at a remove was better still in the chore of getting on from day to day. Women were not immune, though their lack of immunity took a different form. Visiting one of the army hospitals one day with the ambassador, Harry watched a nurse lose her temper and scream at a patient, a middle-aged civilian caught in crossfire somewhere. A friend had smuggled him a can of beer and he was drinking it without bothering to conceal the can. He had a distant look in his eyes, the look of the convalescent alone in an unfamiliar situation, and as a civilian he was entitled to write his own rules. His head was bandaged and his back wrapped in a heavy poultice. All around him were badly wounded American soldiers, many of them unconscious, several of them amputees. The nurse was very pretty and looked scarcely older than a schoolgirl, except for her mouth, twisted in a snarl.
Who do you think you are?
she screamed.
You asshole. You moron. There are sick people here. You will not drink beer in my ward!
The startled civilian was unable to reply. His eyes welled with tears and he looked away as the nurse seized the beer can and threw it into a hamper before running from the room.

They motored on, Harry gazing at the humpbacked moon as he continued to fix Village Number Five in his mind's eye. He wanted very badly to remember it whole, the burned-out clinic, the old man, and the dying woman. He tried without success to remember the village's actual name. Much later he learned that it had been evacuated, as if it were contaminated or cursed.

 

 

 

T
HE
next morning, Sunday, Harry went to Mass at the church near the harbor, Église St.-Sylvestre, the one with the yellow wood walls and ungainly spire, cane chairs in the nave, and Christ on his cross behind the altar. The church was built in the late nineteenth century, a spiritual souvenir of the colonial power. There were many Roman Catholics among the well-to-do element of the capital. Missionaries in the countryside had also been energetic, though the soul of the nation was said to be Buddhist. Buddhism took many forms in the countries where it was practiced, and in this one the salient feature was intransigence, a failure to get on the team. Street demonstrations were common. Monks were known to set themselves alight in support of the demonstrations, confounding officials of the Military Assistance Command and the American embassy. Something perverse about it, this failure to help out. A newspaper photograph of a monk burning in the street was not at all helpful, and they knew it wasn't helpful. But all that was remote from the formal atmosphere of Église St.-Sylvestre. The single spark of color in the church was the stained-glass window in the east wall of the nave, a recent gift from wealthy Connecticut families who wished to show solidarity in the struggle against communism. One of their number was an important publisher and he solicited funds from friends in the neighborhood. Finely etched in the glass was a fragment of poetry from the hand of Cardinal Newman, a puzzling choice in the circumstances but the publisher insisted. Harry knew two of the Connecticut families, friends of his parents who often came to lunch at their place in the hill country near Salisbury. Harry's father was asked to join the window subscription but declined, sending a check instead to the Boy Scouts. Harry Sanders Sr. did not approve of the war, being an isolationist Republican of the old school. He always asked himself, What would Bob Taft have done? Surely Bob Taft would never have gone to war in a country so remote, so without promise, a country that would remain on the periphery of things for generations, probably centuries.

Harry was an infrequent communicant at Église St.-Sylvestre. Now he sat alone in the rear and did not participate in the singing of hymns or the recitation of prayers. He did not choose to receive communion that day. He was remembering the village, the headman and the dead woman, the sour odor of smoke in the air, the desolation of it. He said a private prayer for their safekeeping and also a thought for God, neither careless nor distracted, at least where Harry's life was concerned. He did believe that it was selfish to asks for God's aid except in the most trying circumstances.

The priest was voluble, his sermon lasting the better part of an hour. He pleaded for an end to the insurgency. He asked God's blessing in that undertaking. God was not indifferent to the suffering of the people, and neither was He indifferent to the many sins of the communist enemy, communism a heathen ideology ill suited to their ancient land, the soil of their ancestors. The communists wished only the death of God, His eradication. But God would never yield. God would aid the good people in their virtuous efforts to vanquish the heathen. God's spirit was with the ordeal of the good people. We have suffered much, he said, and we must bear much more. We will bear whatever we are given to bear because our faith is mighty and our cause is just. We must remember that God walks with us on our long twilight journey. Two rows ahead, an American army colonel in dress uniform bent his head in prayer.

The congregation stirred, restive as time passed. The priest was small of stature and, for those in the front seats, invisible behind the high altar. He spoke in a reedy voice, his tiny hands outstretched. Harry wondered how many in the church sympathized with the revolution. No more than half, he reckoned; probably less. Perhaps about the same number as adulterers in his family's church in Connecticut, where the priest was worldly and not particular about the sins he absolved. Murder and blasphemy would be exceptions. Murder or blasphemy in that church would be similar to Marxism in this one. The priest's voice faded and was lost altogether as Harry reprised Connecticut and then the events of the day before, motoring back to base, the helmsman mindful of navigation. He had steered the vessel in the middle of the river, and a good thing, too, for a mile downstream they took fire from the mangroves to starboard. The shooters were not marksmen, the bullets falling far astern. When they rounded a bend all was quiet once again. The sergeant fetched three cans of beer from the cooler and handed them around, a reward for their unsuccessful afternoon. Harry sipped beer as night came on, back now in his family's summer place near Salisbury. There was always a crowd for Sunday lunch, spirited conversation, gossip mostly of Washington with detours to horseracing and real estate. Sometimes the local congresswoman and her doctor husband dropped by, everyone pleased to have them at Sunday lunch. Mrs. Finch, as politician and horseplayer, always had something to add. She was a great raconteur. His father maintained that she was the only woman he had ever met who knew how to tell a story, beginning, middle, and end. She was also an accomplished mimic. Her specialties were Connecticut squires and tidewater Virginians and also the president and the speaker of the House, everyone laughing, and at the end of the story the doctor husband exclaiming again and again, Isn't she wonderful? Whereupon the congresswoman smiled and patted his wrist, there, there. The bourgeois life, Harry thought, often a battle in the trenches but never on Sundays, a fine meal served on a three-part Regency table that seated sixteen, Chippendale chairs, a low vase of flowers dead center, decanters of Bordeaux that never ran dry. A wide window looking out on a disheveled English garden, hollyhocks and gladioli, here and there a rosebush. His mother thought the table much too grand for a country house but his father insisted. It had been in the family for a hundred years. Why, the young Winston Churchill had sat at it, drinking everything in sight and reminiscing about the Boer War, rum show. A Marsden Hartley landscape on one wall, an Alfred Munnings stallion on the wall opposite, a wee Homer next to that. Kilim rugs on the floor, not so out of place as you might think. A martini or two before the meal and a walk in the fields after it, a stroll accompanied by the Labrador retrievers, Pat and Dick. There were firearms, too, in case anyone wanted to shoot a pheasant. More Washington, more horseracing and real estate, and an agreement to get together again soon, in Connecticut or the city. Harry was attracted to this life, its iron routine and American naturalness. He could have done with more conversation concerning the world, foreign affairs, but the world was far away on Sunday afternoons. He wondered then if the girl he had been seeing would take to Sunday lunch in Connecticut. She was German, her name Sieglinde Hechler, a technician from the hospital ship docked these past months in the harbor on the river. He had no idea; the life of the squires was an acquired taste. It took some getting used to. Sieglinde was game but it took more than gameness. Gameness took you only so far around the Regency table and its revolving decanters.