Highways to a War (38 page)

He laughed under his breath, his pale blue stare widening, his pupils hectic dots. “You have always been sane, Harvey,” he said. “I knew this in Saigon days. The rest of us are not, as a matter of fact. Only you are sane, with solid marriage. You are a good man, I know this.” He leaned towards me again, waving away possible objections. “You
wept
tonight, in Pagoda! You wept for Cambodian people. And you will weep a lot more, before things are over.

His voice had become increasingly resonant: unlike the rest of us, he didn’t need stimulants to get to this exalted level of his, and maybe he told the truth when he said that the couscous wasn’t its cause. But the agitation that I now saw accompanying it seemed unusual even for Dmitri; I could almost sense him trembling. I couldn’t read the agitation’s cause; couldn’t even decide whether it sprang from elation or distress. I only knew that he needed my company.

“We spoke of beauty,” he said, and waved a hand at the louvers. “Beauty is what we all secretly want, you agree? Beauty leads us on, Harvey, and for some of us presumably it brings satisfaction; peace. But for others, like me—” He broke off and sat back, still staring at me, his stretched mouth open in a smile that mingled cold amusement and outrage; then he went on more quietly. “Beauty mainly torments us, as a matter of fact. Beauty is very small point of light on horizon we can never reach; beauty is the sound we can never hear. And yet we go on pining for it, and can never stop. Yes, Harvey: beauty! Unfashionable concept, now. Even
word
has gone out of fashion among current fuckwit intellectuals. But beauty is all that matters, under everything. Beauty is opening to that world we can never see, but know is there—always nearby, like something through a screen—if we have a soul. But how many have souls? Do you know there are people
without
them, Harvey? Or with souls that have dried up, like corpses of insects?”

It seemed to be my night for being subjected to passionate dissertations. There were so many things that my friends wanted me to know, now that I’d reappeared: perhaps it sprang from the nature of the war here, and the nature of their existence in a beleaguered city. They needed a fresh slate to write on, in order to explain things to themselves—and just now, I was the slate. It was flattering but somewhat demanding, in my present dysfunctional state; even when Volkov’s fury was merely a fury of the spirit, it was somehow more intense than the emotions of others —even Trevor Griffiths. And yet I liked him, even when I half despaired of him.

He was looking at the table now, and his voice had suddenly dropped, becoming flat and sober. “But there are those who love beauty too much,” he said. “Bad mistake.”

Only if beauty’s an illusion, I suggested.

He looked up, clenching and unclenching one fist on the table in front of him. “You think? Possibly you are right. Anyway, for this illusion I would have been prepared to do anything. Anything. I am speaking of my recent marriage.”

There was now not long until curfew. I’d been told that unpredictable Government soldiers were liable to shoot at you in the streets after that, but I knew better than to suggest that we should go at this stage. “I heard about your marriage, Count,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

He lit one of his Gauloise cigarettes, sat back in his chair, and stared at the river in silence. When he resumed speaking, he went on looking out through the louvers, one elbow propped on the table, cigarette poised, his voice taking on the throaty, gliding sound I thought of as Russian.

“Always I have chased after beauty. Beauty of women; beauty of action. But I do not picture myself as noble and spiritual person, Harvey. I am a sensual man; I live and die by the senses. All my life I have been an asshole; woman-chaser; bully. Well, you know that, from Saigon—you know about my sex life and my fights. When I was young, I let down my parents by quitting Sorbonne. They had seen me as scholar and intellectual: ornament to the family. Bad investment, that.” He drew on the cigarette. “My first marriage when I was young I also blew. She was good French girl, but I wasn’t in love with her—and she has not really liked me, as things turned out. It lasted one year: then I went off to United States. I am not proud of this. But nothing, no one, satisfied me.” He widened his mouth, released smoke and squinted at me. “Does it come from God, the hunger for be:auty-or some bloody demon? I am Russian Orthodox—still a believer, as a matter of fact, although not going to church. When I was young, I knew all the time that God was there. I looked always for goodness—because it was so hard to find in myself. And I
wanted
to
fly
—but not in any dimension of reality: can you understand? I would see below me a landscape of lights, and a wind would rush past my ears. I would remember the poem by Alexander Blok—a revolutionary, but nevertheless great Russian poet:

“What I am saying is: I
always wanted life to be like that.
I wanted to smash down door; to dive through space of air that separates us from that other life. Now I am forty, and I still feel that way: that is my problem. Bloody silly bastard, you will say. Yes: silly bastard. But sometimes, filming combat still gives me that. And music always gives me that: Beethoven, Rimsky-Korsakov, Beatles—it doesn’t matter; there are only two kinds of music, good and bad, as the great Duke Ellington has said. In both music and action is something eternal, Harvey—and we want what is eternal.”

He poured the last of the pot of coffee slowly into our cups.

“For a time,” he said, “with this woman that I married, whose name I still can’t say, and who was beautiful in way very few are—for a time love gave me that. It was first time in my life I had truly been in love. Came to me after some delay—at age thirty-eight.” He glanced at me sideways, perhaps suspecting he’d find amusement in my face; reassured when he didn‘t, he went on. “I had found at last the woman I had always searched for without knowing it—or so I thought. Everything exquisite—even her hands and feet. I have read that in poetry, and not understood it: who cares for hands and feet? When you love like that, you understand. But what I had also found was ice: the beauty of ice.”

He drew on his cigarette again and was silent, closing his eyes; then he leaned forward. “Listen to me, Harvey. To die here in Cambodia is now very easy; can happen any time. Maybe it happens to me soon; maybe not. This is just a fact, and no big deal —I think you know that. And because it is the fact we live with, I want to tell you these things tonight.” He paused, looking into his coffee. “You guys take the mickey, and call me Count. I am not one, of course, but as a matter of fact my grandfather Alexis was. Small-time nobility in czarist days—it didn’t mean much, even then. The family wasn’t rich; had no big estates: he was government official. When he fled with his family to Paris from the Revolution, my father Peter was fifteen: old enough to know what he was losing, and to remember it for rest of his life. He made me remember it too—so I have always lived with memory of Holy Russia. Memory that is not my own: a dream. This is incurable, Harvey: it was introduced from birth! Dreams are what White Russians feed on, along with their goddamn borscht and piroshkis. French citizens but never French, they waited always to go bade-for Communists to fall. Can you imagine that? Imagine it! Russian cathedral in Paris on Sundays: Orthodox service, with male choir singing music from heaven. And opposite, a Russian tea shop where we would go afterwards to eat pastries, all in our best clothes. The women looking beautiful. There were all the faces: the Russian faces. The poor lost bloody nobility, and the ones who were pretending to be.”

He drank down the last of his coffee.

“Holy Russia itself is a dream; yes. It never existed,” he said. “And this dream made my father unable to be happy. He was low-grade clerk in French civil service; the goddamn Frogs were never going to promote him. To them, we were never French. His life in spare time was given to politics: sad fairy-story politics of White Russian groups, having secret meetings about what could never happen: overthrow of goddamn Soviets!
Mon Dieu.
It will last a hundred years, that bloody system. He wasn’t: a strong man; he died young-starved of his dreams. I am angry about my father. Don’t misunderstand: I hate all tyrannies—not just Soviet. Nazis were in Paris when I was a boy, and I hated them. But Nazis are gone now: gone since Hitler died in the bunker. So why do so many goddamn Western intellectuals not hate this other tyranny as much, which goes on liquidating millions? Why don’t they weep for those who are rotting right now in Soviet’s Arctic camps? I will tell you: because they only
pretend
to hate tyranny. In their hearts, they love tyrannies that suit them. The bastards love power, and want some of it to rub off on them.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, looking through the louvers.

“Despite all this, I would not play political dream games my father played. No politics. When I learned to use a camera, I had found a way to run on the edge of such things: on the edge of what was happening in the world, and not fall in. I merely put
consequences
of politics on film: a cameraman is not involved, right? But he is inconvenient witness.”

It was some moments before he spoke again. When he did, it was so softly I could only just hear.

“Linda told me I could not be employed any other way: useless for anything else. I had found a way to be paid for living life of a madman, she said. She put it charmingly, wouldn’t you say, Harvey?”

“So that was her name,” I said. “Linda.”

He made no answer, but continued to look out at the river under the moon. The net on the sampan was swinging a little, in a light wind. It was five minutes past curfew now, and the other tables had emptied; only one white-coated Cambodian waiter was left here, looking at us nervously from the shadows by the cash desk and no doubt hoping we’d go. But Dmitri had begun to speak again, lighting another Gauloise, still not looking at me.

“A beautiful American,” he said; and now I could only just catch his words. “A Minnesota Swede. Worked with embassy in Saigon when we met. Perfectly groomed, perfect clothes—even her apartment perfect. Thirty-five: divorced, no children, ambitious and‘. fastidious. Right? Wanted nothing -in life to be messy. Yes, I know, all wrong for me. Jim Feng knew; Mike knew;
I
knew. Why does love choose wrong person for us? How can we ever know that? Maybe who we love is the ghost of someone else, loved in some other existence, in body of wrong man, wrong woman. Have you ever thought of that?”

I waited, and he studied the coal of his cigarette. “I never loved anyone like this,” he said. “Loved even her clothes, hanging on a chair.”

And you married her, I said.

“We married, we went to Washington because she wanted. She had been appointed to big post in State Department there. She asked that I come and get a nice television job in Washington: she would not be married to a man who could die any morning, any afternoon. This was reasonable. I too wanted a safe life now, with her. Wanted everything: security; a child. So I did all she wanted: gave up covering combat, gave up Vietnam.” He laughed under his breath. “None of it worked, Harvey—and I was not safe at all, as a matter of fact. I was in far more dangerous and destructive life than before, which in less than two years made me almost wipe out what is left of my brain.”

He broke off and leaned back in his chair, narrowing his eyes at Tonle Sap’s far shore. Another green arc of tracer went up, but neither of us commented. When he spoke again, his voice was matter-of-fact and toneless.

“You can have a woman and not have her,” he said. “I had not experienced this before. Only her body is there—and you have not really possessed that either. I have asked myself: why did she marry me? Still I’m not sure; but perhaps for some reason she has seen me as someone she can change and fit into her life, to be there when it suits her—and only when it suits. We were going to have child when it suited—but this didn’t happen. I would come back to the apartment many nights, and she would be out at meeting or function, and I would go out into fucking Washington and get drunk. I became a very big drunk, Harvey. My performances in Saigon were not in same league as this. Some of these performances were given at formal dinners she took me to: at goddamn diplomatic receptions. I did not fit in; made some bad scenes, I’m afraid. She kept saying I was of impossible temperament: that I was exaggerated;
too much.
Am I too much, Harvey?” He gave me his open-mouthed smile.

“Your friends wouldn’t say so, Dmitri.”

“Diplomatic answer, bald one,” he said. “I ask myself, why did she ever marry me? Answer: because when we met, I was combat cameraman for CBS, my stuff on American prime-time news every week—and that had glamour for her. She liked what was glamorous. But now I was just a lousy news cinecameraman in Washington, shooting fires and police drug busts: not so impressive.”

She didn’t like what she’d turned you into, I suggested.

But he stared past me, his face blank, appearing not to hear. “We had a little Persian cat,” he said. “Our quarreling frightened it, and it ran away. When it went, I knew love was gone. And so I came back to Indochina to do all I am good for: covering battle.” He looked at me.
“Why,
Harvey? Why do men and women quarrel? When to love each other is greatest thing in life? I have worked it out; I’ll tell you for nothing. Because each wants the other to be
someone else.”

He stood abruptly, smiling as though he’d concluded a successful meeting; then he put a hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry, brother—you are very patient, but you are stoned courtesy of Nurseryman, and I have selfishly kept you from bed and in danger of military patrols. You are looking at your watch: yes, it’s past curfew, I know. Don’t worry. We’ll go back to Royal up middle of the road, talking loudly: that way, troops know we are press.”