American Romantic (5 page)

Sieglinde had not mentioned her childhood until this evening, her wordy coda to five hours of more or less constant lovemaking. It had been a while for him and, he suspected (probably the better word was hoped), for her, too. The silk-string hammock took some getting used to, so for a while they were a kind of ménage à trois, afloat and then not afloat. The hours became minutes and the minutes seconds, until they were both outside of time altogether, slick and overheated; and when they gave themselves over to it, he found another, happier self, an assured self, one he had not known existed. Her eyes were closed, her face rosy, and she was smiling. This went on and on in a circle of abandon, time expanding, time diminishing, time uncrowded, and in a moment of drowsy delight he proposed that they remain in the hammock forever, or anyway until they were too old for lovemaking, and even then there were ways and means, and if the ways and means failed they had memories enough from just this one flawless night—and what did she think of that idea? Her answer was another arpeggio on his thigh. He dozed, half asleep and half not, conjuring a meeting between her memories and his, not only this night but from their childhoods, a sort of symposium without a moderator. Her father was in a dark corner of the room drinking schnapps. His father was explaining Marsden Hartley to her mother, a startlingly pretty woman who wore thick glasses and a white silk ascot. Then his mother interrupted to mention the Regency table, unsuitable for informal gatherings, which this certainly was. She abruptly switched to German but the effort was unsuccessful, and Mrs. Hechler nodded in agreement and asked if there was anything to eat. General Marshall was gazing out the window, distraught at the number of Germans in the room. Who brought them? Why were they here? Congresswoman Finch asked the general for a light and he lit a match, his fingers trembling slightly. He said softly, I don't understand a word of their damned language. Mrs. Finch smiled grimly and said, I know. Sieglinde offered to translate but the offer was not taken up. From the dark corner, Corporal Hechler was polishing the buckle on his infantryman's belt and humming the overture to
Tannhäuser.
Finally, at a loss, everyone fell silent. Harry slept.

A little later, Harry extracted himself from the hammock and stepped across the lawn to the villa. He fetched a bottle of lager from the fridge and stood in the kitchen looking across the tree shadows to the hammock and the high hedge beyond. Sieglinde was invisible but the hammock looked full, motionless in the still night air. The neighbor's cat, black with white paws, scuttled up the ficus tree and sat on the low branch. Harry lit a cigarette and walked back outside, as contented as he had ever been. More than content. He had the idea that he could snap his fingers and summon an orchestra or a black-tied waiter with a tray full of champagne. The grass was wet underfoot, cool to the touch. It took a moment to resettle in the hammock, cigarette in one hand and the bottle of lager in the other. Sieglinde took one long pull on the cigarette and another from the bottle of lager and closed her eyes again, settling her head on his shoulder. In a growly sort of voice, Harry began to tell her about the clinic and Village Number Five, the headman with the bundle in his arms. The settlement was immaculate, not even a gum wrapper or cigarette stub, his own silence in the face of it all. He stopped there, the experience so strange in retrospect he was unable to describe it with precision—and he realized then that he would have this story for the rest of his life and in time it would become as shopworn as a much-used passport, the visa stamps smudged, illegible dates, illegible signatures, the hodgepodge of a traveler's life. His own photograph was anonymous, not a good likeness; his signature was undecipherable. What had been crisp was now blurred. The bare bones of a well-told story required coherence, ironic asides, and a plot as well knit and tied together as a jigsaw puzzle and somewhere in it a detail as provocative as a cat in a tree.

Go on, Sieglinde said.

I'm thinking, Harry replied. What he meant was, I'm trying to get the sequence of things straight in my own mind. The exact time of day. The precise shape of the headman's bundle. The dimensions of the clinic; well, he had those. But he could not summon an account of his own emotions—not fright, something other than fright. The clinic was smoldering, he said to Sieglinde, and the scene before him seemed like a relic from the century before, an eternal tableau vivant. It was as if he were witnessing an event from history, something written about in books and puzzled upon—the fall of Carthage, the construction of the Great Wall of China. Hamlet's soul. The headman looked through him as if he were made of glass, superfluous in any case. He had the idea that an invisible hand was in charge, a manifestation of fate itself, implacable, not to be denied, not to be understood most of all. This small corner of the world, he said to Sieglinde, was not my business. I felt I had no right to be there. I was an interference. My presence was an offense. More than an offense, a provocation. I had arrived unannounced and uninvited, as if I had every right to be there, almost an obligation—to open the door without knocking and be welcomed without question. My clinic, my
laissez-passer.
The bundle moved and I saw that it was a woman, at first I thought a child, and then I knew she was old. The headman carried her easily, as if she were weightless. Harry said to Sieglinde, And when the woman died at last, I took one step back. When the sergeant called to me from the boat, I could hear the fear in his voice, a kind of stutter, his desire to be quit of village life. I hesitated only a little while before walking away in order to leave them in peace, the last two inhabitants. They were lost as surely as if they had been in a death camp or on the
Titanic.
The headman remained still as stone on the top step of the clinic stairs, smoke misting around him. When I turned at last to go I saw four soldiers emerge from the clinic looking dazed. They were filthy and obviously disoriented and almost at once one of them saw me and unslung his carbine and said something, I had no idea what.
I do not have the language,
and so we were strangers to one another. But his meaning was not difficult to imagine.
Stop! Who are you? What are you doing here?
I decided to ignore him and walk away. I pretended to myself that he was not present. That he was not armed. And that is what I did, and when I reached our boat he remained where he was, now with a look of—I would call it disgust. The sergeant told me later he had fired one round, but I did not hear it and doubted the sergeant's word. Later, when we took fire from the shore, I knew somehow that we would not be harmed. The shooting was a farewell. Adieu. Don't come back. And we motored on without incident. Early this morning I attempted to write a report of the affair. We call it a “report for the file.” But it wouldn't write. It was a sentence fragment, you see. So I went to Mass and listened to the songs and the interminable sermon at the end, all the while looking at the light falling through the Connecticut Window and thinking of Cardinal Newman's directive. Thinking about it, I concluded that my fate was to witness events I didn't understand and would never understand. The way of the world. I did believe that the invisible hand had shown its cards, a specific prophecy, perhaps a warning—and what that warning was, I cannot say.

Nothing good, Harry concluded.

Sieglinde yawned. She said, I don't believe in invisible hands.

Harry said, You should. You don't know what you're missing.

I think you are an American romantic, Harry.

I've been told that before.

I think also that you love the war. I think you have found your life in the war. Everything else is an interlude.

That's not true, Harry protested, and even as he said it he knew that Sieglinde was on to something. A partial truth, certainly: not the whole truth, but still a useful truth, though not to Harry.

Why did you tell me that story?

It was on my mind. Who else would I tell it to? I had the feeling you might see something in it that I didn't. Or couldn't.

She said, Maybe I did.

He said, I had to tell it to someone.

Did it bother you, your afternoon in the village? What did you call it? Village Number Five?

Bother? Bother would not be the word.

No, she said, I suppose not.

But believe me, the invisible hand was real enough.

Oh, she said dismissively, that again.

 

Fireflies gathered in the crown of the tree, a kind of celestial starburst or halo. Dawn came softly, silky pink and then crimson. Exposed in the daylight, their Garden of Eden stark in the glare, their emotions were disconnected. They might have been strangers. Harry wished he had never brought up the village, the headman and the dead woman, or the invisible hand. A busted flush, it turned out. He supposed Sieglinde was uncomfortable with enigma. That would be the German in her. Germans were uncomfortable with enigma generally, even Nietzsche. “God is dead.” But Harry did not appreciate her silence now, nor the stubborn expression that went with it. They carefully disentangled themselves from the hammock and stood together, swaying a little. Then her hand flew to her mouth and she gave a sharp cry, stumbling backward, losing her balance. Harry looked up and saw the cat in the tree, its back arched, yawning, its slender tail coiled around its legs.

My God, she said. It's a cat. I didn't know what it was—

Only a cat, Harry said.

I thought it was a snake, she said.

They walked the few steps to the villa. She allowed him to take her hand but did not seem happy about it. He fetched two robes from the bedroom and gave one to her in the unlikely event the houseman, Chau, showed himself. Harry made a pot of coffee and they sat side by side at the kitchen table without speaking. Sieglinde looked uncomfortable in the robe, as if by accepting it she had assumed an obligation. Harry watched the sunlight gather. Somewhere far off he heard the thumpa-thumpa of a helicopter and a car's horn in the street. It seemed the morning did not belong exclusively to them, Sieglinde and him. She pulled the robe tightly around her and bent over the coffee cup, the coffee too hot to drink. How did they reach this point of discord? Harry knew it was something he said or something he failed to say. He had been misunderstood, certainly. He looked out the window at the limp silk-string hammock and remembered a conversation he overheard years before between his father and his father's oldest friend. The friend had recently separated from his wife and was explaining that they, he and the wife, could not agree on the definition of “virtue” and once they understood that, the fundamentals of it, the disagreement seemed to illuminate everything else. All their disputes over how a life should be lived, including who was responsible for what in the household. A great relief, really. Once they discovered their irreconcilable views on the subject of virtue, the marriage was ended, case closed. Harry remembered a long uncomfortable silence and then his father clearing his throat and giving a wan laugh. Virtue? You can't be serious. Never more, the friend said.

Harry said, I've offended you.

Yes, I think you have. You didn't mean to. Perhaps that's worse.

Can we forget it?

It's better forgotten, she said with a slight smile.

We can come back to it later, Harry said.

Or not at all, Sieglinde said.

When we know each other better.

Sieglinde did not reply to that.

It's my job, Harry said. It's what I do. I'm assigned somewhere and I go. Today it's the war, and if you're a foreign service officer and want to get ahead, that's where you must be. The war is in first position. You could be somewhere else, New Zealand or Portugal, but what would be the point? Or back at the State Department in Washington, moving pieces of paper from the in box to the out box and back again. That's part of the drill, too, tedious but necessary. That's where I'll be in a year, Washington. But right now it's important to understand what's wrong here. And much is, and the end is not in sight. The war is the interlude, Sieglinde.

She said, What kind of war is it that we can devote six hours to screwing in a hammock?

He said, I think there was some of that even in the Great War. Even in the trenches.

She was silent a moment, idly stirring sugar into her coffee. She said, My grandfather was in the Great War. He never spoke of it. Not one word. But he left behind a diary, a day-by-day account of his life. A thick diary, ninety-two pages. He began with full paragraphs, often accompanied by drawings. He was a competent draftsman. And ended with two- and three-word entries and one word repeated:
Shrecklichkeit.
Frightfulness. My feeling was that the sense of life, the pulse of it, had been drained from him. He was a shell. A husk of a man. And he lived to great age, perhaps because there was so little of him to be kept alive. I do not think there was sex in the trenches, Harry. Not at Verdun. Not on the Somme. I have discussed this with the ship's doctor and we agreed that Herr Freud was wrong, perhaps because he led a sheltered life. Sex is not the primal instinct. Survival is. I have to say that my other grandfather was the lucky one. He was killed in 1916 and did not bother to keep a diary. His experiences died with him. The one who lived, quite frankly, frightened me. I think he frightened himself.

Harry watched her carefully all this time, her voice a monotone, the voice of a sleepwalker. If her voice had been a musical instrument he would have called it an oboe. She spoke with tremendous conviction.

Sieglinde rose, stepped to the counter, and poured a fresh cup of coffee. She stood quietly looking at the appliances, the refrigerator and the range, ovens side by side, the dishwasher, a toaster, an electric coffeepot. She had never seen a kitchen like it except in advertisements in
Der Spiegel
and
Paris Match.
She peeked inside an oven and was not surprised to find it pristine. She ran her hand over the counter, smooth as glass, similarly spotless. She had heard that Americans made a fetish of cleanliness. The open shelves were filled with canned goods, beans and tomatoes and condensed milk and chicken soup and
lychees au sirop
and English tea and artichoke hearts, enough to feed a family for a week or more. During World War II such a hoard would last a month. More than a month. Sieglinde shook her head and began to laugh.