American Romantic (4 page)

Sieglinde said, I like your villa. It's spacious, nicely arranged. I like it here under the stars with you.

Look, he said. I'd like you to stay. You know that. No question about that, is there? But after a while you won't like it because there's no future here.

But I do like it. I like the tropics. I like the heat and the pace of life, the scurry. A siesta in the heat of the afternoon. Afternoons last forever in the tropics, don't you think? It's from another century, this country. And since I don't care much for this century I've decided to choose another, especially the afternoons. I know the war is here but I pay no attention to it. Why should I? The war is not my concern. What time is it?

Around three, Harry said. In the morning.

Listen now, Sieglinde said. Not a sound. Not a breath of air. The air has a weight of its own, the scent of your garden and the trees. Can't you feel the dew falling? That's why I don't like Hamburg, its burdens. Clamor. Cold and wind. Rain from the north. You say it's dead here but it's not dead, it's indifferent. You can bend this country but you will never break it. The people have old souls and their patience is infinite. They don't even think of it as patience. I'm sure they have another word for it in their infernal language that you can't understand. Germans have patience, too, but we call it thoroughness. Hamburg nights are glum. There's a glare. The truth is, Germany is badly oversized. There's too much of it. And I will not stay here forever because German people make bad colonists and that includes me. But I will stay for a while.

They do?

Not one of our colonies prospered. Not one.

What about France?

Ha-ha. Ha.

Sorry. Irresistible, Harry said, realizing he had played a queen and gotten nothing for it.

The French did not want it badly enough.

Want what?

Their country, Sieglinde said. They didn't want it badly enough to fight for it. Or maybe they wanted something else. Maybe they were tired of the life they had and wanted a new one. They were halfhearted.

I think it's fair to say they were very badly generaled. And they were overwhelmed, superior force, superior weapons. Soldiers with fight in their blood.

Always the Third Reich, Sieglinde said. The war is over for years and years and our Third Reich is still with us. Probably it will never go away in my lifetime. My grandparents and my father died in it. And I will say something more. It doesn't seem like yesterday. When you mention the Third Reich I think about my mother, always. These thoughts are not good thoughts—

Sorry, Sieglinde.

When something is irresistible you should resist it, Harry. There is nothing you can tell me about the Third Reich that I do not already know. I think you do not study your surroundings. Also you do not listen with care. Always your own thoughts. I think your war is always inside your head. Don't bother to deny it. I know it's true, every minute of the day. You're like a pianist with a head full of musical notes except your head is filled with the war. No, I do not care to have you kiss me. Kissing avoids the issue. This stupid war of yours. It's a stupid thing to have in your head at all times.

You, Harry said. I think about you.

You must understand I have nothing to do with the Third Reich.

I know that, he said.

It's an accident of nationality.

I know that, too.

I have a photograph of my father the day he went away to the war. He was roughly the age that I am now. He wore a wool uniform with corporal's stripes. His face was full of hope, I would almost say of rapture, as if he were leaving to join a religious order, its specific rituals, chants and choirs, meditations, observances, discipline. The four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. He was slender but very strong, a marksman, and so handsome, with a loop of hair that fell over his forehead. Freckles, too, and a mustache that made him look older. He stood not at attention but in a kind of slouch, his rifle held butt-down as a farm boy might hold a pitchfork. My father was a hell-raiser and now he was going east, the Russian front. My mother held the camera and my father was smiling into it, a brilliant smile, the one that was full of hope. I was so young, I thought his uniform was a costume, a clown's suit or a knight's armor. My father didn't last the week, but we did not know that right away. We didn't know for months and all that time my mother was writing letters to a dead man.

Harry was silent now, listening to the rise and fall of Sieglinde's voice, its urgency and melancholy. This was the first he had heard of the war's progress from the other side, the civilian side, the enemy side. She spoke slowly, her attention fixed not on him but on some distant point in the night sky. He remembered one of his university professors described the American victory as a mixed blessing. Its unambiguous result did not encourage introspection. The victory was total. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the worm of triumphalism began its laborious crawl—though things would look otherwise to a marine waiting in Okinawa for the invasion of Japan. Harry doubted the professor's sour complaint. He seemed to ask for too much. Yet it was true that a colossus had been born. A colossus was heedless, difficult to manage, so many irons in so very many fires. Three wars in twenty-five years and at last the colossus was forced to look inward. Now it faced an enemy whose will and cunning seemed without limit. The Chinese adage, preposterous when applied to the Military Assistance Command, fit snugly in the mind of the guerrilla force: “To gain, you must yield; to grasp, let go; to win, lose.” He realized that Sieglinde had fallen silent.

Are you listening to me?

Yes, Harry said.

I can stop if you want.

I don't want you to stop.

You want me to shut my mouth.

No, I do not, Harry said. Believe me.

My father, she said, was an auto mechanic. A good one apparently. The official notification of his death stated that he died bravely. He did his duty. My mother was bitter and, young as I was, I remember her asking if he died fixing a tank's engine or the flywheel of a staff car and how many others died with him. Perhaps it was a bomb that fell from nowhere, an unseen aircraft in the night sky. So, Sieglinde went on, our house was never the same. My mother was often absent, foraging. She became a forager for food. We lived in a small town east of Hamburg and when the firebombing came we could see the flicker of lights in the sky and later the west wind blew smoke and debris over our little town. The smell of it was horrible. And in the morning we saw ash on our lawn and the sidewalks, the streets, too. Oh yes, also we heard the explosions, a kind of rolling thunder that went on and on. I am only looking for a place of repose, not so much to ask.

Sieglinde, Harry began.

I have never told that story to anyone, she said.

It's safe with me, Harry said.

My mother died in the last year of the war, Sieglinde said. It was so cold that winter, the coldest in decades, they said. They told me she died of pneumonia. They did not say where. Her body was not recovered. Perhaps it was pneumonia and perhaps it was something else. I have always thought she just went away to a place of no return. I would not be surprised if she were still alive. So I went to live with my aunt in Lübeck. She didn't want me. She didn't know how to feed me. She had barely enough for herself. But we managed. I went to school and later I learned about the x-ray and so I have made a life for myself thanks to my knowledge of the x-ray. I am looking for repose and that is why I came here on the ship.

As you say, Harry said, not so much to ask.

No, not so much. Hard to find.

Maybe this is your place after all, Harry said.

I shall have to see for myself.

You are welcome to stay with me. More than welcome. As you can see, I have plenty of room. Of course you would have to jump ship.

I can do that.

What's stopping you?

I have not made up my mind.

You would be perfectly safe here. The shooting war is elsewhere, in the countryside. Out of sight, really. I suppose this house could be a place of repose. It's quiet. I have one servant who keeps to himself. The library is quite good. Do you read French? The house belonged to a French businessman and his wife. A year ago they sensibly decided to return to France.

So it wasn't a place of repose for them.

Evidently, Harry said. I believe they were between the lines, playing a double game. They say the French are good at that, but they aren't any better than anyone else. It's exhausting. The family had been here for three generations and now they've gone home, some village in the north near Arras. They went there in the summers and now they live there. I met them before they left, a charming couple. They hated leaving. They loved the villa. Among other things, they liked the food here. Accomplished cooks, both of them.

And you?

Repose is not in my repertoire. But I have no objection to it.

She was silent. Then, after a moment, Sieglinde said, I may be an emigrant my whole life. Before she died, my mother said she hoped I would find a place in the world. And now I suppose I have, like it or not.

A rolling stone, he said, an attempt at a joke.

Perhaps a rolling stone, she said. You like it here. I know that.

I like my job and my job's here.

You don't miss America?

Not yet, he said.

I wonder why, Sieglinde said.

 

The time was now four in the morning. They were lying toes-to-head, head-to-toes, in the silk-string hammock. The night was very warm, their bodies slick with sweat. Harry's toenails were thick and ragged, Sieglinde's tiny, painted pink, bright thimbles of color at Harry's ear. The hammock moved but slightly and the heavy leaves of the trees overhead did not move at all and at that moment, dawn far away, even the rotation of the earth seemed to slacken, a useless castaway lariat. Sieglinde's eyes were closed, her hands curled up under her chin. She was lovely in the moonlight, her skin the color of alabaster. There were emigrants all over the world, fugitives from oppression or famine, disease, revolution, heartbreak, simple boredom, bad memories. He did not like to think of her as one of those now here, now there, always far from home. At first when she began to tell her story, he believed she was laden with guilt, feeling that she was somehow responsible for the calamity in her family. But it wasn't guilt. She was furious at the turn of events in her early life. Furious at the war, the struggles, the deaths. He remembered a story the ambassador told him. The ambassador had visited the Jewish cemetery in Warsaw with an old friend, a worldly Jew. His friend took care to examine the gravestones, everyone dying in 1939, 1940, 1941, 1942, 1943, 1944, 1945—and when he came upon a grave marked 1952 he gave a little strangled laugh and said, At last, someone dead of natural causes.

Harry was looking at Sieglinde and thinking about nationality and responsibility, always different in the old world than the new. Except for Native Americans, everyone in the United States came from somewhere else. All the nations of the world were represented in America. Homogeneous nations had a tighter fix on responsibility when things went wrong, and the result was either bloodshed or a sullen quietus with subterranean thoughts of revenge because there had been a stab in the back. Nothing had ever gone so wrong in America with the exception of the Civil War, and President Lincoln, dead from an assassin's bullet, became the nation's most revered figure. Harry held the thought, thinking that it needed refining. Sieglinde stirred, muttering something, and curled her hands more firmly at her throat. She said, What are you thinking about? You're so quiet.

He said, You.

The streetlight at the end of the long driveway cast a wan glow. Now and again in the street, heard faintly but not seen beyond the high hedge, were bicyclists, announced by the splash of rubber tires. The police, perhaps, or workmen on their way to the early shift. Harry took no notice. He believed himself secure in the world, the silk-string hammock as invulnerable as golden-armored Orion high above in the summer sky, light years away. Sieglinde stirred once more and Harry thought of her freckle-faced father, off to the war, less than a week to live, posing for her mother's camera. She had called him a hell-raiser, and what did she mean by that? He was good with engines. Liked to clown for the camera. None of Harry's own family had gone to war, neither the Great War nor the one after that. He was the closest anyone in his family had come, if you call a few random and ill-aimed shots near a no-name river at dusk being “under fire.” During World War II it seemed to him that his parents went to a funeral every other week, though it was surely much less than that. He had not thought to ask Sieglinde about her childhood. He supposed it was misplaced tact that caused his reticence, and they had known each other only one week. Now he knew her memories were not happy, her father dead, her mother absent, a diminished life in a defeated nation. She seemed to be on the run from all that. Sieglinde had not thought to ask him either, so she was spared descriptions of Connecticut, the clapboard houses and their swimming pools, the cocktail hour, the yellow hills rolling off to the mysterious interior. Political talk at table on Sundays, a self-conscious yet sincere effort to be engaged in the affairs of the nation, civic responsibility. Would these memories, his and hers, speak to each other? They would not. A German childhood of the twentieth century would be a grueling experience, most strenuous, one could say a burden or nemesis—both justice and retribution, the irreconcilable tension between remembering and forgetting. Certainly there would have been good times in the early days following 1932, things returning to normal, patriotism rekindled, community gatherings around towering bonfires with inspiring speeches and song, the nation rising once again, fresh confidence, industrial production up, inflation in check, an audacious ambition that resulted in peaceful coexistence at last with the ominous Soviet Union, a miracle of diplomacy worthy of the Iron Chancellor himself. In less than a decade, all of it in ruins.