Exiles in the Garden (7 page)

I didn't mind, really, Lucia said. It was innocent enough.

Kryg is never innocent, the count said.

What's all this about? Alec said.

It's nothing, Lucia said. The ambassador knew my father years ago. I was startled when he brought it up. I didn't expect it. My father was the furthest thing from my mind. I hardly think of him at all anymore. She turned to the count and countess and added, He left my mother when I was a small child. I never saw him again and I have no memory of him. He is dead many years.

I'm sorry, the count said. Kryg is often tactless.

He's a brute, the countess said.

Unreliable, the count agreed.

Kryg said I looked exactly like my father. Even the freckles. That was a surprise.

Poor darling, Alec said.

Nonsense, Lucia said. I thought your party was wonderful, even Kryg. I can't remember the last time I met so many—she laughed brightly—vivid personalities. Next time you must come to us.

Alas, the count said, I rarely leave my house.

He won't go anywhere! the countess cried. He's hopeless!

You only have to climb over the stake fence, Alec said.

Stop it, Alec. She knew he had taken too much champagne.

It's an ordinary fence.

Alec, Lucia said.

You could vault it if you wanted to, Alec said.

The count laughed at that and wished them good evening.

Later that night, Alec asleep, Lucia reprised her conversation with Ambassador Kryg. She had no idea she resembled her father. Her mother had but a single photograph, her father seated at a café table in Prague wearing a dark suit and a Borsalino, his head turned as if greeting someone. In profile he was hard-featured, a rough-cut young man with a low forehead, built like a bull, no freckles. He held an unlit cigarette in his right hand. Lucia had no personal memory of him. He had never been in her life. When she was fifteen her mother told her he was dead but did not say how or where he died. Her attitude was, Good riddance. Lucia did not press for explanations. It was then that her mother gave her the photograph. Your father looking his best, she said, and smiled, something she never did on the rare occasions when she spoke of him. God, she said. God, he was a good-looking man. All the girls wanted him.

Then Lucia remembered something Kryg had said. She was certain of very little in her father's life except for one thing: he had never been in business.

The Count d'An was a man around whom rumors collected. His money was said to come from tin mines in Bolivia or a ranch in the Transvaal or the diamond trade in Amsterdam. Alternatively he was penniless and kept afloat by his wife, who owned estates in the Balkans. He never talked about the sources of his wealth, the common trait—as Alec helpfully pointed out—of old money and criminals. The count and countess had only recently arrived in Washington, and no one knew from where. But they seemed to know everyone. Whatever he did and wherever he came from, the count had the gift of hospitality. He and his countess—she as refined as he was blunt—were the soul of courtesy, easy and at the same time aloof. Looking at him, his muscular build and his bright Gypsy eyes, Alec thought of the seen-everything faces at the newspaper. The count would be good at games, good at getting in and out of scrapes. Not easily fooled. Not good at distinguishing one mountain from another. Very good at aura. When Alec asked his father about the count, the senator shook his head and said the name meant nothing to him. Alec searched the newspaper's morgue but found only one reference. The Count and Countess d'An had been among the patrons of a fashionable equestrian event near Baltimore, proceeds to benefit the Girl Scouts. Beyond that, a blank slate.

Alec and Lucia went frequently to the garden next door. The count and countess were now Paul and Marie. Lucia believed she had found a parallel world in their company. She thought of it as an underworld—not Virgil's, not Al Capone's, perhaps something resembling the depths of the ocean explorer Cousteau. Evenings in the garden were fluid, slow-motion theater, a form of escape. There was a shifting cast of characters because the exiles often brought friends, a visiting parliamentarian or intellectual or anonymous someone who had crossed a border and shown up unannounced in Washington. Second-tier intellectuals from second-tier countries, according to Alec, but often interesting and attractive nonetheless. He meant exotic. They had spirit but were in no way lighthearted. In fact they were hard going. Difficult personalities, Alec said, and Lucia reluctantly agreed. Listening to them investigate the past, she did not always understand the references: names flew by and she did not know whether they were politicians or writers because they were usually described in the language of literary theory, the objective correlative, narrative line, sentimentalism, prolepsis. The names meant nothing to her, the Czechs Novotny and Slánsky, the Hungarian Béla Kun, and the Italian Antonio Gramsci. Now and then a life jacket would fall at her feet: Arthur Koestler. But Lucia listened carefully all the same, finding something indomitable about them because they had lived through terrible times and had survived. Life had dealt them very bad cards and they were playing the cards with aplomb but without optimism. She thought they were damaged goods because they had seen so much and suffered greatly and were now ignored by the wider world, irrelevant and without standing, a nuisance. They were forever writing something, a critical article or manifesto, a novel or a cycle of poems or an allegorical play. At the slightest provocation they would quote passages from memory, well honed from nights in coffeehouses and private parlors. Lucia believed they were trying to reimagine their personal histories and what lay in store, if anything lay in store, and in that way they were sympathetic.

Also, Lucia said, the men had beautiful manners. Yet grief clung to them.

One of the men said to her, We were born on the wrong side of the tracks on the wrong side of the world. She thought the guests-of-many-languages had acknowledged defeat. They were yesterday's men, speaking in the rhymes and riddles of the disenfranchised. They were searching for some place to call home, and this search was doomed to disappointment because they already had a home but the door to it was closed and locked. Searching for another was like searching for a fresh set of genes. Meanwhile the exiles stayed on in Washington, the seat of what they called the American empire, as far-flung now as Alexander's or Caesar's. Since the assassination Washington had become tightly wound and bedeviled by theories of conspiracy—fertile ground, in other words, for the writing of a novel, a poem, or an allegorical comedy. These projects were begun but rarely completed. America was so large, so prodigious in its energies, so various, it was difficult for the exiles of small nations to grasp. The writers among them found themselves blocked, unable to move forward. Their material had vanished.

Among the exiles—and that was another difficulty, defining their status—refugee, exile, émigré, or displaced person—not from the point of view of American immigration law but their own sense of themselves. A few of them adopted (not without a sly smile) the German expression
gastarbeiter,
guest worker, except they were not guests and they did little work except for translations and the unfinished manuscript in the desk drawer. The Jews were the most reticent, as if what they had borne was unspeakable, a family calamity so private and distressing that it could be spoken of only among themselves, and no language they knew was equal to the task. At first Lucia thought that in their privacy and exclusivity the Jews were like the Swiss; she came to disown this opinion later. It was at one of the early soirees that she first heard the word "Holocaust" and was at once drawn in by unfamiliar place names, the hinterlands where the furnaces were located, Hitler's crimes set side by side with Stalin's and the accompanying argument over which were the more appalling, the signature crimes against humanity. Lucia was shocked into silence. The argument was tentative, the door to the awful room barely ajar; these were not stories for mixed company and certainly not with a glass of champagne in your hand, and in any case the need to forget and the responsibility to remember were in combat. Eichmann's trial had taken place only a few years back. Just once in Lucia's hearing did the argument spill over, reticence set aside in the passion of the moment. The linguist Madame Brun and Ambassador Kryg put down their champagne flutes and attempted to settle the matter. Perhaps settle was too strong a word. A settlement would not be reached that night or any night.

Madame Brun, half a head taller than the ambassador, spoke first. The uniqueness of the Holocaust was its specificity. Gypsies and homosexuals and a few communists were not excluded but the target was Jews. To be so selected was appalling. Guilt was not established. What guilt? There was no guilt except the guilt of blood. The terrible burden was borne mostly by Jews. That was what made the Holocaust monstrous, uniquely monstrous; that, and the industrial efficiency and civic enthusiasm the Germans brought to their task. Whole communities vanished, men, women, and children. Medical experiments, work dawn to dusk, the ovens tomorrow or the day after.

Dear lady, the ambassador replied, the uniqueness of Stalin's labor camps was precisely the lack of specificity. Anyone could be imprisoned, bad communists, good communists, fascists, loyal Russians, disloyal Russians, intellectuals, brutes, Christians, Jews; the net was wide. The imprisonment came at the whim of Stalin and his clique. No one was exempt. No one in the Soviet Union was immune from the knock on the door, the cattle car east, the pistol shot to the back of the head, the anonymous body in the gutter or floating in the Neva.
That
is the modern world, dear lady. Utter randomness. You must read
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Solzhenitsyn calls it a novel but it is not fiction. I shall not mention the numbers, perhaps as many as thirty million souls, because as Stalin said, one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic. When Madame Brun replied, her voice was a kind of hiss, a voice of profound indignation shadowed by infinite melancholy.

Lucia turned away. She felt trapped on this corpse-strewn path into the past, and she was only twenty-seven years old, no scholar of history, no scholar of anything except the crystal air of the mountains. The Swiss were well known for keeping their noses out of other people's business, especially political business. Exiles in Switzerland were expected to conform or go away. The blind eye was a kind of national emblem, and if that meant peace at any price, well then, peace was the reward. When Lucia described the argument later to Alec, he listened with close attention and what seemed to be sympathy. When Lucia finished she was near tears. She could not remember having been so upset. Alec put his arm around her shoulder and said, We will never understand this. The Holocaust is outside our experience. The most we can do is look at the photograph and imagine ourselves inside the frame. It's a question of imagination. Of course there was sympathy. How could you fail to have sympathy. But sympathy never saved anyone from the hangman. The point was not to be complicit.

You're not, he said. I'm not.

I wonder sometimes if America is not a fool's paradise, Alec went on. But whether it is or it isn't, this is where we live. Our hats hang here. We are very far from Siberia or Auschwitz.

Alec, she said, that's so cold.

I can't pretend to an understanding I don't have, he said.

Mustn't we feel for them?

We can try, Alec said. It's insulting to them to think that we can succeed.

America was too large, she thought. There were too many people in it of too many tribes and languages; they would never understand one another. The definition of "understanding" seemed to be "success." And she, too, had turned away from the ambassador and Madame Brun as if their dispute were private, as perhaps on some level it was. She found it difficult to listen to them, their words so bitter and irreconcilable. Fate had placed them in opposition. It therefore came as a shock to Lucia when she concluded that, in some manner she was unable to account for, she belonged in the company of exiles. She was hearing a piece of music that was familiar but she had no idea where she had heard it before, unless it was her mother's European salon come alive once again.

One night she left the party late. She had turned her ankle on one of the flagstones near the fountain and had been caught and helped to a chair by one of the new arrivals. Alec had not accompanied her to the party, preferring instead to watch the baseball game on television. Nikolas was attentive, had brought her a glass of champagne and ice cubes wrapped in a towel. He expertly wound the towel around her ankle and insisted she sit a moment. Allow the ankle to rest. They chatted briefly about the company before Lucia said she had to go home, she only lived next door. Her husband would be waiting for her. Nikolas helped her down the front steps and into the empty street. Paul d'An had lent Lucia a cane, but she was unsteady all the same and hurting. The night was very warm, the street silent.

I have not seen you here before, Lucia said.

I've just arrived from Budapest, Nikolas said. They allowed me to come here and teach for a semester. My family remains in Hungary, my father and my sisters. My father is a Lutheran pastor, but of course he has no church so he has become a bricklayer instead, rebuilding someone else's church that will be used for another purpose, something not churchly.

Lucia smiled weakly. She was tired and her ankle hurt.

I am a linguist, he said. Also, I am a historian of Marxism. And a novelist.

She smiled again, seeing a joke there somewhere.

The disciplines are not incompatible.

Like bricklaying and the ministry? She looked at her watch.

Not a bit, he said. Nikolas lit a cigarette and said Madame Brun brought him. She said Paul and Marie were convivial and their parties the center of things. She was not wrong. Still, I don't know that I like it here. I think I would rather be in Europe. Not Hungary. Hungary's finished.