In Partial Disgrace (30 page)
“Perhaps she is a communist?” Mother opined hopefully, as if somehow this would defuse or explain the situation.
My father had buried his face in his hands.
“This cannot go on,” he murmured. “I have seriously miscalculated. We must look for another line of work.”
She was tenderer then with him than I ever saw her, as well-affected as with a pup. She raised up his black face and kissed it all over, the cheeks, temples, and eyes.
“If we have no choice but to expose ourselves to the general public,” she said, “we must be prepared to meet them on their own terms.”
Father mulled this over silently, reveling in this rare display of girlish affection. “But that animal,” he said hoarsely, “that
animal
!” It was not clear to which of our three visitors he was referring. Then suddenly he reached down, and snatching a clump of violets from the lawn, crushed them against his nostrils to expunge the encounter.
By the sideways motion of the carriage, it was apparent our guests were arguing, and as they disappeared into a caul of thunderheads, I thought I could see that grunted gongword,
uck
, float up and out into the empty theater of the Marchlands.
(Rufus)
What manner of man was this boy who fled a Cannonia in flames? Merely the greatest spy of our closed, sad century, which has been very good to dedicated, cultured, and incorruptible spies. A true triple agent, a man of a thousand twists, Iulus had burrowed deep in the bowels of the latterly failed intelligence agencies of both East and West, but was finally loyal only to his own dubious, ridiculous, failed state. He hid his fear of the Communists behind a mask of contempt, and hid his contempt for America behind a mask of acquiescence; a triple bluff. For in truth, a spy’s essentiality is this—a dedication to forever escaping the clichés of one’s contemporaries. And, after all, who
can
you trust, if not such a spy?
An agent’s greatness is tested only when his most precocious and accurate observations are disbelieved at the highest levels, and for the greater part of his career no one on either side accepted his essential brief—that both Russia and America, despite their windy rhetoric and vast armadas, were too big, too messianic, and too politically immature to do anything but culturally bankrupt one another—two pitiful helpless giants, who would eventually fall weeping and wailing into each other’s ghostly arms.
There is a Cannonian fairy tale concerning a wolf hunt in which the dark beast is finally cornered in its lair, and at the last moment of a titanic struggle, the tortured and stunned animal leaps up, and putting his paws upon the hunter’s chest, implores him in the strangely lilting voice of the eternally feminine, “to try and understand him.” “And this,” goes the refrain which so often ends their tales, “is how you are going to live the second half of your life. The losers have lost, but the winners have not won.”
Although he would be the first to deny it, the records show that Coriolan Iulus Pzalmanazar was born in County Klavier of Cannonia in 1924, just outside the town of Silbürsmerze, an ancient silver-beating town of steep roofs, tidy public gardens, and an inn where the young philanderer, Goethe, had once spent a night. After dinner, when he believed his black poodle Pregestiar to be insulted, the poet precipitated a drunken brawl. Later in the lock-up, he justified his outburst on “feeling hemmed in by space, causality and time,” setting a precedent for intellectuals ever since in blaming bad behavior on cosmic abstractions.
We now know this to be false, though only slightly so; Iulus’s papers being one of many refugee passports concocted at the Silbürsmerze mint, his birthdate that of a typhoidal child who survived only a few months. We also know that he was first delivered to America in 1947 by a Cannonian
The
Anti-Drakon
, designed by Amerakansi Golland, 1911. Steel rolled in Bethlehem, Pa. Shipped unassembled from Vancouver to Vladivostok, where the hull was tested as adequate by firing shells against the aquablinde sections, then by Transsiberian rail to the Nikolayev works at St. Petersburg.
Laid down 3 July 1914; launched 15 September 1914, as the largest pre-World War I sub, (Krab Klasse, designation AG 23) commissioned by Admiral Bubnov, christened
Imperatritsa
, and trialed under the ice floes where its two Tovaratsche mine tubes were tested as adequate.
1917, disassembled and sent by rail to patrol the mouth of the Danube. Captured in dry dock by Astingi sea robbers, refitted and relaunched under the Cannonian flag, commanded by the “Ace of the Adriatic,” Max Von Trapp, who learned his English from James Joyce. After a tour of duty on the Mze (the first warship to call at Silbürsmerze since 1673), the
Indefensible
was quarantined at Pula, Croatia, and surrendered with the Austro-Hungarian fleet to Anglo-American hegemony.
Control transferred to Britain, November 1918. January 1919, transferred with new engines to the White Russians, Amur River Gunboats flotilla. April 1919, scuttled off Odessa to prevent capture by Soviets. Nevertheless captured, raised, and redesignated
Proletary
(Hotel Klasse) and refitted with Dzhevetsky torpedo drop collars at Bizerta.
1923, Caspian Sea, sunk by accidental flooding while being towed, with loss of entire crew. 1924, raised, double hulled, redesignated
Bolshevik
(Krokodil Klasse). May 1929, engaged Italian torpedo boats off Bari. February 1934, sighted stricken off Cosenza. August 1936, reported sunk in error. 1939, dismantled and shipped by rail to the Urals, for refitting by Bednay Metallist Machine Works; conning tower rebuilt, disposition of original to Naval Museum, Leningrad. 1941, transferred by Molotsvsk Canal to the Northern Fleet, redesignated
Stalinets
(Zippo Klasse). December 1942, beached at Rosta. 1943, bombed in error by Soviet aircraft; January 1944, deck replaced with submarine
1
off Mt. Desert, Maine, where after a close call with the local constabulary, he took refuge in Greenwich Village, posing as a tool-and-die maker by day and an abstract painter by night. He never required much sleep, having been brought up with a definite aversion to losing consciousness, and he always looked twenty years younger than he was, characteristic of his mother’s lineage. Strange to find in a man without a country, without papers, without even a name, an almost imperial authority.
He frequented bohemian bars in the Village, and was accepted by the locals as one of themselves, though they gradually became suspicious when they discovered he was not an indifferent artist, and indeed was their intellectual superior by a wide margin. He drank and womanized in short bursts, and when he needed a vacation, adopted the guise of a genial salesman of gumball vending machines, his perfect Dublin accent and raconteurial genius making him an international social favorite and leading his shadowers to many dinner parties in exotic parts of the world.
Iulus would have been the first to admit that he had strong multiple loyalties, though he despised mere informers. His feeling, after all was said and done, was that if our purpose is clear, our identity is really of secondary importance. And in the modern world, a multiple identity seems to have become the absolute minimal requisite for survival, for life’s greatest difficulty is supporting the character you have assumed. There is, it seems, in the Cannonian soul, as in Tudor England (the Cannonian’s favorite period of history), little distinction between candor and discretion, public and private, inside and outside, fiction and nonfiction.
He especially liked talking with the spinster women who typed the daily intelligence summaries. He found these ladies, spared the inert ideas of education, to be our most cultured citizens. He admired their clearheadedness, their lack of envy and sentiment, and above all their skepticism for the male games of leverage and deduction. “He made you feel that you were the only person on earth,” one of them told me, “and as a result, you fell in love, not with him so much, but with yourself.” Iulus never took advantage of these women. He promised them nothing. He simply knew that by being around them, he could eventually gauge our attitude, the degree of nemesis, the aura of anxiety—and then, together with a smattering of unrelated facts from public sources, simply infer our tactics. Having creatively empathized with those who disinterestedly
copied
policy, then went to the ladies’ room to laugh like horses, it was easy enough to divine our strategic inclinations.
There are still those who see Iulus as a man with an unslaked thirst for secretiveness and conspiracy. Certainly he was an independent operator. Both the Comintern and the CIA sent him carloads of assistants. He would buy them a drink at the Waldorf and send them on their way. Indeed, that is what preserved him so long. Of course, there will be those who will ask how far we can trust such a narrator? This is rather like asking the question: can one trust a sonata?
Iulus had an excessive contempt for propaganda of any sort. Ideologically speaking, he had perfect pitch; he not only heard things as they were, he heard them as they
had
to be. The Cannonian loathes rhetorical pathos, self-puffery, and the eternal discussions that are mistaken for action. He never went near the operatives of other services; discussions of communism and capitalism bored him to tears. I never once heard him argue for a cause. “I’m a professional,” he said to me one Central Park evening from behind a bust of Schiller with stylized hair and vacant gaze, “and the job of a professional is to make the easy look difficult.” The man could hollow out anything—propelling pencils, hip flasks, Ronson lighters, even lipsticks, and he fitted out every other lamppost on the Upper West Side of Central Park to take a message. Despite the recent plague, these same boltholes are used today by those many Manhattanites who still prefer their risky assignations with an avid stranger. As an attentive student of Oswald Spengler, he realized in his first few months of residence that democracy meant the complete equation of money with political power, that money eventually destroys intellect, then becomes its own destroyer. If Russia was one of those parabolic curves which announce the death of a species, America had “too much future to be significant.” And he knew that the only thing his own unrecognized, unrewarded, and unloved country could offer the world was its historic stubborn refusal to equate wealth with authority, and its absolute refusal to think like a nation, race, or state. “There is no organism more prone to weakness and madness than a nation,” he wrote, “and the smaller the nation, the wider the perspective.”
Iulus had a special duty. If he ever managed to pick up evidence that nuclear war was imminent, he was to climb atop a large rock just inside Central Park at Fifth Avenue and 68th Street, and flash a radio message to the Soviet Mission at the United Nations.
Yet for every piece of information Iulus sent East, he issued a warning to the West. His principle of selection was simple. What tends to get ignored is what is obvious to anyone with normal standards of prudence, and such obvieties are almost always more significant than the deepest, darkest secret. He was his father’s son in that he believed that the rise and fall of governments, like any marriage, can best be traced to accumulative inadvertencies and unconvincing denials, rather than grandiose elaborate stages—those perfect little stories of blow-off or collapse. And in fact, the most rare and courageous modern act of all is simply the disinterested raising of a cautionary finger by a person of demonstrated character. Yet no one was more made for America than that acme of individualists, Coriolan Iulus, and no one, even when he was in profoundest contest with her, held the United States in more fond regard. “America!” he often said, “where you can deny, deny, deny, to your last breath!” And there was nothing he did with so much puzzlement and regret as passing on the quantified evidence of Americans getting exponentially dumber. Nonetheless, he knew that the esoteric analogies of the East, as well as the pathetic vanities of the European states, both missed the true salience of America—where through the deafening noise of church and commerce, a civil society had been smuggled in which an individual might profitably hide—a haven for those whose first order of business was to escape the ruinous influence of their own self-appointed intelligentsias. When there was no place left to hide in America, it would lose its grip upon the planet’s imagination. America was not about hope. It was about escaping the tribe. “The great thing about the U.S.,” Iulus often said when being interrogated, “is that you can quit being an American without suffering terrible consequences. And those quitters can do some fantastic things. To quit flat out and
not
be exterminated for it—now there’s an idea worth dying for!”
Cannonia and America had a special and preferential historical relationship, he insisted, beyond their shared distaste for oracles and pundits, as the only two nations in History of whom it could be truly said that all their wounds were self-inflicted. And what could Cannonia offer America? The wincing knowledge that there are historical periods in which you have to live without hope.
After all, you must recall, things
were
different then. All the configurations had flipped. It was the ancient American, toughened by his encounter with modernity, who was about to lead the innocent European out of the theater of megalomania; the American who would offer his hand to the blasted cosmopolite with the stained shirtfront, and maneuver him, without much grace, but without thinking to ask for anything particular, into the post-war half-life of tatty triumphalism, up-to-date torments, and unintended consequences. And once here, at the fag end of the
fin de millénaire
, after rearranging certain creature comforts, the American host turns to his classy ward with a mildly sardonic grin to shrug, “Dry hole?”
The natural fit between the Cannonian sharp temperament and the soft tissues of America strikes one as astounding, and one can only speculate on the consequences if more Cannonians had chosen to emigrate. Of Pzalmanazar’s comrades who made the choice to escape, we see a similar adaptive energy, fired perhaps by the natural bond between those nations who ignore history and those who can only export it. Of Iulus’s generation, I know of only three who came and survived. One, a high school physics teacher from the CharmNetz region, a woman matronly and mustachioed even in her twenties, became the only female admitted to the Manhattan Project, and this only a few months after her arrival. Another tortured soul, a supervisor in the Phamaphy factory, which made papier-mâché airplanes and tanks to be placed on runways and roads to confuse bombers, claimed to be a professor of Greek and director of the opera, and arriving with only a pack of Tarok cards with photos of murderers, sex offenders, and arsonists in the place of the medieval figures, soon became an associate at the New York Psychoanalytical Institute. And a third, perhaps the best known to the general public, a portly former doorman at the
Auberge L’Espérance
near Sare, known for his unbreakable cheerfulness in the face of menacing inclement weather, was moved with alacrity to the seniormost levels of the Department of State, and often wore his old uniform to diplomatic receptions at the Eastern embassies. A talented race, the Cannonians, though not one, as we used to say, with whom you’d care to share a foxhole.