by R.J. Ellory
A friend of mine once told me something about writing. He said that at first we write for ourselves, then we write for our friends, last of all we write for money. That made sense to me, but only in hindsight, for I wrote these things for someone I believed I would never see, and then I wrote them for money. A great deal of money. And though the story I will tell you has more to do with someone other than myself, and though this thing began long before I met him, I will tell you about it anyway. There is a history here, a history that carries weight and substance and meaning, and I write of this history so you will understand how these things happened, and why. Perhaps you will understand the reasons and motives, perhaps not, but whichever way it comes out …
The bell above the door rang again. Annie paused midsentence and looked up. The wind had pushed the door open, and the chilled breeze hurried in once more to find her where she stood.
She closed the door, closed it tight into the jamb, and walked back to the counter. There were things to do, a new delivery to log and inventory, and the sheaf of papers would have to wait until she returned home.
She wrapped the papers carefully inside the package that Forrester had brought, tucked the letter he had brought in the package too, put it into a bag, and carried it through to the kitchen at the back of the store. She set the bag on a chair, and in the event that she might absent-mindedly hurry from the store for some reason, she covered it with her coat. She would not forget it; could not forget it.
Annie O’Neill thought of the papers throughout the day, like a promise waiting, a sense of anticipation and mystery surrounding them, but even more so she thought of the man who had visited. Robert Franklin Forrester. A man who had known her father, and in the few minutes she had spent with him had given her the impression that he’d known her father far better than she had. And the reading club. A club for only two it seemed. First meeting evening of Monday, 26 August 2002, right here at The Reader’s Rest, a small and narrow-fronted bookshop near the junction of Duke Ellington and West 107th.
TWO
Seemed to all who knew him, and those indeed seemed few enough, he was called Sullivan. Just Sullivan. To Annie O’Neill he was Jack, the man who shared the third floor of her apartment building and the suite of rooms that faced hers. Jack was, like Annie’s mother, an anachronism, a man out of time and place, and perhaps the greatest living storyteller Annie had ever had the fortune, or misfortune perhaps, of meeting. He was there when she moved into the apartment back in 1995, standing at the top of the stairwell as she heaved and humped boxes and bags up the stairs. Never once offered help. Never really said a word until finally she came to rest and introduced herself.
‘Annie O’Neill,’ he said. ‘And how old are you Annie?’
‘Twenty-five,’ she’d replied.
‘Fuck it,’ he said. ‘Wanted someone closer to my own age … figured there might be a little housewarming, if you know what I mean?’
Jack Sullivan had been fifty then, was fifty-five now, and possibly had lived the most fascinating life that Annie could have imagined – fascinating, that is, if only from the standpoint that she could never comprehend why he’d chosen the life that he did. His father had served in the US military in the Pacific and returned home after the Japanese surrender in August of 1945. His wife, Jack’s mother, was pregnant by Christmas, and come 14 September 1946 Jack Ulysses Sullivan was born. The early part of his life, his childhood and teens, had been regular enough. An only child, a loved child, he attended school, took College, studied photography, and at age twenty he followed in his father’s footsteps and joined the army. His photographic qualifications got him assigned to the Press Corps, and this duty took him out to Vietnam in June of 1967. He stayed there until December of 1968. Came back with a bullethole in his right thigh, hadn’t walked straight since, and though he was invalided out of the army he never lost the taste for his work. That taste took him to Haiti in March 1969, and there he stayed until the death of Papa Doc Duvalier and the accession of his son Jean-Claude to the presidency in April of 1971. After Haiti came El Salvador – February 1972, just before the failed revolt in March that year – an assignment that lasted until January of 1973. In August of ’73 Sullivan flew out to Cambodia and photographed the atrocities perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge as they attempted to oust Lon Nol; he witnessed first-hand the vicious guerilla warfare tactics employed after the US officially ceased its bombing, and when he was shot once again in September – the same leg and almost the exact same place – he returned to the US. He stayed for five years, working freelance for UIP and Reuters, and other smaller syndicates and franchises of the media network, but always he was pulled by the war zones of the world. By October of 1979 he was back in El Salvador after President Carlos Romero was ousted in a military coup; was there in March of 1980 when Archbishop Romero was murdered; there when the American nuns and missionaries were killed, as Jose Duarte returned to lead the new junta, and fled home once again in January of 1981 when martial law was declared. And it was from such places as these that the stories came, the haunted painful stories and, as Jack Sullivan spent much of his time the better part of drunk, he would spill those stories out to anyone who might listen.
And Annie listened. Listened good. There was something about the horrific brutality of all he had witnessed that made his ramblings almost intoxicating in their intensity.
The night she’d moved in Jack Sullivan had come knocking on her door with a bottle of Crown Royal and two glasses. She invited him in, it seemed the neighborly thing to do, and he stayed until three or four in the morning regaling her with his horrors. There was an image, a moment perhaps, that had stayed with her through all the things he’d said that night. He had talked of his return from Vietnam in December ’68. He spoke of something called the Tet Offensive, the attack on the Khe Sanh firebase, of hills called 101S and 881N. He spoke of a man he’d befriended, a member of the Langvei Camp Special Forces Unit, a young man of twenty-two who’d been shot through the side of his face.
‘Could see his teeth through his cheek,’ Jack had told her, ‘and when he tried to speak the blood just came running out like someone had turned on a faucet.’
Annie, never a drinker, drank more that night than she had in the previous year.
‘January ’68 the Vietcong came all dressed up in South Vietnamese uniforms and stormed the US embassy in Saigon,’ he told her in his slow and languorous drawl. ‘US troops were helicoptered in onto the roof and they went through that place room by room and killed every last person inside. I was there, took some snaps of our brave boys doing Lyndon B.’s work. Took six hours … and Christ, I can’t even begin to count how many they killed.’
Jack smiled as if reminiscing about a family barbecue some warm Savannah Sunday afternoon.
‘In February we liberated the Citadel of the Imperial City of Hué. That was one helluva blow for the commies. That was the jewel in the crown for the Tet Offensive. There was a river there, the Perfume River, and alongside it a park that separated Le Loi Avenue from the riverfront. I was there, me and a few others, and we waited in the rain until we could get inside the Citadel compound. The guys we waited with were called the Citadel battalion … tough bastards, fought every hard battle throughout the previous six months between Hai Vanh Pass and Phu Loc. Anyways, the Americans and the South Vietnamese went in there and killed every last man standing, replaced them all with their own people. Place was awash with blood. And in the middle of all that, this flock of white geese came down and settled in the compound. Splashed around in the puddles … been rainin’ all night … and some asshole says we should catch one and eat it.’
Jack laughed, a dry grating sound that seemed to fill Annie’s new and empty apartment.
‘Sergeant said if anyone so much as touched one of those geese they’d be court-martialled. Place went quiet. Everyone knew he was no joker. Geese stayed there the whole time we did … have some pictures somewhere … perfect white geese splashing in puddles of bl
oody rainwater, and around them the dead bodies of a hundred or more men.’
Sullivan paused, drank, refilled his glass.
‘Then in April Martin Luther King got himself shot, and then in June they killed Bobby Kennedy, and by the time they elected Nixon in November I’d sure as shit had enough of standing in three feet of mud and blood taking pictures for the military. I came back in the middle of December … figured I got myself shot in the leg so’s I’d have a good enough reason to come home, and I remember sitting in a bar, half-drunk out my mind, and the radio comes on. It’s a week before Christmas and the guy on the radio says John Steinbeck died, and then they play ‘What A Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong and I start crying like a high school cheerleader done lost her boyfriend. I’m sat in a bar … a bar no more than a mile from where we are now, and I’m sobbing my heart out like a kid. No-one says a word, not a thing, and they just leave me there weeping like a baby for the best part of an hour. Hell, I must have drunk half a bottle of something, but when I goes to pay the barman says to keep my dollars, that he understands where I’ve been, and though he never agreed with the war he still respected me for going out there to protect the innocent and the American way of life. Didn’t tell him I was crying for John Steinbeck … wouldn’t have seemed right, but sure as shit I was. Sat there crying while Satchelmouth sang about what a wonderful world it was, and considered the fantastic irony of it all.’
Jack paused, drank some more, set his glass to balance on his knee.
‘The Earth was not capable of swallowing all that we took to Vietnam. We dropped bombs and food parcels … fucking bombs and food parcels … and then Nixon got us out of there with our tails between our legs and we’re still asking ourselves what the fuck we went out there for in the first place. Helluva thing Annie O’Neill … helluva thing.’
And then he’d smiled, raised his glass, and Annie had raised hers, and he whispered: ‘To the blessed crazy irony of everything eh?’
She smiled, drank her glass empty, and closed her eyes.
She didn’t remember falling asleep, but when she woke he was gone and the bright new light of morning was peeling apart the shadows in her empty apartment.
That had been her welcome to Morningside Heights, Manhattan, and Jack Ulysses Sullivan had never stopped talking to this day. They became close, they shared their time, their apartments almost – each possessing a key for the other’s door, each letting themselves in whenever the other was home to share coffee or insignificant details of insignificant days – and though there was never anything but a platonic relationship, there was still a closeness that Annie could only ever measure in terms of family. Jack, in some small way, represented the father she’d never known, and thus Jack, drinker though he was, could only ever be forgiven for his idiosyncrasies and irritations.
Jack was there when she returned home that Thursday evening, the sheaf of papers clutched in her hand, thoughts of her father and who he might have been in her mind, and when he asked if she’d like to come in and ‘share a cup of coffee with the drunken fuck opposite’ she smiled and said she would like such a thing very much indeed. She took off her coat, set her papers down, and busied herself making a pot in his kitchen.
‘Someone came in today,’ she told him, as they sat at the small table in his front room. He looked back at her with the fifty-five-year-old face that never ceased to amaze Annie with its depth of character and life; a face created with origami and then carried through a storm. He was a handsome man, had been blond she figured, and now his hair was a salt-and-pepper gray turning white at the temples. His eyes were deep set, his nose thin, almost Roman, and when he spoke there was a light and a fire within the shadows beneath his brows that said everything that could be said without needing to say anything at all.
‘Someone came in,’ he repeated. ‘You had a customer?’
She shook her head. ‘No, not a customer … an old man, a man who said he’d known my father.’
‘The mysterious and irrepressible Frank O’Neill no less,’ Sullivan said.
Annie had spoken with Sullivan about her father before, had shared the little she knew and the less she remembered, and Sullivan had always perceived that deep sense of longing. She missed the fact that she had never really known him. Missed it like hell.
‘He brought something for me,’ Annie went on. ‘And he made me an invitation.’
Sullivan looked up and frowned.
‘Robert Franklin Forrester,’ Annie said. ‘That was his name, and he told me that he knew my dad many years go and they had founded a reading club.’
Sullivan turned his mouth down at the sides and nodded. ‘Seems logical, him owning a bookstore an’ all.’
‘He said he was back in Manhattan for a while and he figured we should revive the tradition … start the reading club again. He’s coming over Monday.’
‘Just the two of you?’
Annie nodded.
‘Hell of a club you have there.’
Annie smiled. ‘He seemed okay, lonely I think.’
‘And you said it was okay for him to come?’ Sullivan asked.
‘I did.’
‘You want me to come protect you … he may be a serial killer or somesuch, preying on beautiful young women working in run-down bookstores.’
Annie waved Sullivan’s sarcasm away. ‘He brought something for me to read … my first assignment for the club, and he also brought a letter my father wrote for my mother.’
Annie rose and walked to the door. She took the sheaf of papers from the chair beneath her coat and returned to the table. She set the papers down.
Sullivan lifted the pages and leafed through them.
‘It’s a novel I think … something like that,’ Annie said. ‘This man Forrester said that one of the members of the original club had written it.’
‘Big novel.’
‘I’m sure there’s more,’ Annie said. ‘I thought he might bring it one chapter at a time or something.’
‘You’ve read it?’
Annie shook her head.
‘You mind if I read it too?’ Sullivan asked.
‘Read it with me now,’ she said.
‘The whole thing?’
‘Sure, it’s not that long.’
Sullivan nodded. ‘Fetch my glasses from the dresser will you?’
Annie fetched Sullivan’s glasses, took a moment to refill her cup, and then pulled her chair around to sit beside him.
The room was warm, and beyond the front windows she could hear the wind sneaking its way around the eaves of the building as if it were gently pleading to come in out of the cold.
She looked down as Sullivan turned to the first page, and they started reading together, page for page, line for line almost, and there was something special about their closeness that made her feel that this – once upon a time – might have been something she’d have shared with her father:
A friend of mine once told me something about writing. He said that at first we write for ourselves, then we write for our friends, last of all we write for money. That made sense to me, but only in hindsight, for I wrote these things for someone I believed I would never see, and then I wrote them for money. A great deal of money. And though the story I will tell you has more to do with someone other than myself, and though this thing began long before I met him, I will tell you about it anyway. There is a history here, a history that carries weight and substance and meaning, and I write of this history so you will understand how these things happened, and why. Perhaps you will understand the reasons and motives, perhaps not, but whichever way it comes out I believe that these things are better spoken than left silent. I carried years of silence, and sometimes silence seemed all that I possessed, but once I realized that you existed my life meant something else. So read, read all of this, and make of it what you will. This was my life, and because of who you are it is to some degree your life too. As Whitman once said, ‘My surface is myself, under which to witness youth i
s buried. Roots? Everybody has roots.’
These are my roots, diseased and broken though they may be, but they are my roots. Read on, and I trust you will understand.
This thing begins with a child born of a tryst that could never have survived. His history begins with the peasants and gypsies, once Polish by birth, who occupied the Sudeten and Carpathian Mountains beneath Krakow and Wroclaw along the Czechoslovakian border. It was from this lineage, these wild-eyed, dark-haired gypsy wanderers, that this child, Jozef Kolzac, was born, a breach beneath the filthy shrouds of a hand-stitched canvas shelter in the bitter winter of 1901. His mother, an itinerant, illiterate seventeen-year-old, impregnated by a man she neither knew nor remembered, died in childbirth.
Kolzac, taking his name from the warrior myths that had passed down through age after age, legends that were spoken by the Silesians who camped along the River Oder long before Jagiello and the Saxony accession, grew into a small, weak child, narrow-shouldered and pale-skinned, scrimping for nourishment amongst the scraps and offal that were thrown from the tents and coverings where his people slept and ate and raped and killed one another. He was shunned perhaps, this runt, this stripling child, this half-minded semi-animal who possessed no rights.
Jozef – surviving through childhood, this in itself a miracle, and astute enough to know that succor and support were not to be found here – left his place of birth and took to the deeper Carpathians. He fell in with a wandering musician, an old man seeking an apprentice, and here Jozef learned his trade, the one skill that would in time serve to sustain his life, to feed him, to bring him some small comfort in a country that was barren and loveless and cold.
Following the old man he headed west, back towards Krakow. Camping by night, walking by day, they became friends as well as journeymen and compatriots. Jozef learned of music, his fine fingers dextrous and agile across the instrument the old man carried, a bell-shaped violin, seven strings, balanced across the knees and plucked with one hand while the other strummed. The music he played was beautiful, flowing and melodic, and through and amongst the small encampments they would pass, and there find rugged wildeyed people, as much animals as Jozef had been as a child. These people would grow calm and listen, and feed the minstrels, at night lighting fires and dancing, singing their songs – ancestral voices rolling down the years – while Jozef Kolzac, now in his teens, now a strange and oddly featured youth, played as if the Devil possessed his fingers and God his soul.
