by Joseph Kanon
“If you commit suicide, do you go to hell?”
Father Tim glanced at him, visibly disturbed, then nodded. “Yes.”
“Always?”
“Yes, always. You know that, Nick. It’s a sin against God.”
“What if you helped? What if you made someone do it? Then what?”
“You mean that poor woman,” Father Tim said quietly. “We don’t know why she did that, Nick. You mustn’t judge. It may not have anything to do with your father.”
“No, not him. I was thinking about Mr Welles.”
Father Tim looked at him in surprise. “Mr Welles?”
“They said in the papers he was pressuring her. What if-”
“I don’t think that’s true, Nick. And even if it were, we mustn’t judge. He’s only doing what he thinks is right.”
“No. I saw him. He’s-” Nick searched for a word, but it eluded him. “Bad,” he finally said, knowing it was feeble and childish.
But his inadequacy seemed to relieve Father Tim. “Not necessarily,” he said smoothly. “I know it’s hard for you to understand. I don’t condone his methods either. But Communists are godless people, Nick. Sometimes a man does the right thing the wrong way. That doesn’t make him bad.”
Nick looked at him, stunned. Tim thought his father was godless-that’s what he’d done. We mustn’t judge. But Tim had judged and now he was going to save Nick, shipping him off to the priests and a world where people didn’t hear much. Save him from his father.
“Now this won’t do, you know,” Father Tim said, catching his look. “Taking the world on your shoulders like this. They’re still pretty young shoulders, Nick. The right and wrong of things-that’s what we spend our whole lives trying to figure out. When we grow up.” He smiled. “Of course, some people never do, or I’d be out of business, wouldn’t I?”
Nick saw that he was expected to smile back and managed a nod. There was nothing more to say, and now he was frightened again. Even Father Tim was with the others.
“What you’ve got to do now,” Father Tim said with a kind of forced cheer, “is get on with your own life. Never mind about your father and his politics and all the rest of it. That’s all over. You’ve got to look after your mother now. Right?”
Nick nodded again, pretending to agree.
“You have to let go,” Father Tim said quietly, his final point.
“He’s still my father,” Nick said stubbornly.
Father Tim sighed. “Yes, he is, Nick. And you’re right to honor him. Just as I do mine. That’s what we’re asked to do.”
“Your father’s dead.”
“But your father’s gone, Nick,” he said as if Nick hadn’t interrupted. “Maybe forever.” His voice was hesitant, struggling for the right tone. “He wanted it that way, I don’t know why. You can’t hold on to something that isn’t there. No good comes of that. It just makes it harder. He’s gone. I’m not telling you to forget him. But you have to go on. He’s like my father now. It’s an awful thing. And you so young. But it would be better if-” He floundered, slowing the car at the light, then turned to face Nick, his eyes earnest and reassuring. “You have to think of him as dead.”
He reached over and placed his hand on Nick’s, a gesture of comfort. Nick stared down at it, feeling the rest of his body slip away, skidding on ice. Nobody was going to help. Ever. Tim was waiting for him to agree. His father was godless and he was gone, better for everybody. It’s what they all wanted, all the others. If he nodded, Father Tim would pat his hand, the end of the lesson, and leave him alone. You’ve got to stop fighting with him, Uncle Larry had said in the study, and his father had.
“I’ll never do that,” Nick said quietly, sliding his hand out from under, free.
Father Tim glanced at him, disappointed, and took his hand back. He sighed again as he made the turn into 2nd Street. “You will, though, you know,” he said wearily, sure of the future. “Things pass. Even this. Nothing is forever. Except God.”
And suddenly Nick knew what he would do. He would remember everything, every detail. He looked at the street, the pink-and-white blossoms, the bright marble of the Supreme Court Building catching the sun, and tried to fix them in his mind. The curly iron railing in front of Mrs Bryant’s house. Lamp-posts. The forsythia bush. Then he saw the moving van, the big packing boxes scattered all over the sidewalk in front of his house like the mess their lives had become. The prettiest girl at Sacred Heart was standing on the stoop, her vacant eyes animated now, giving directions to the movers. Crates for the china. The end tables sitting on the patch of city yard, spindly legs wrapped in protective brown paper. Two men in undershirts sweating as they heaved a couch into the van. Suitcases by the door, ready. They were really going.
In that instant, as his mother saw the car and waved to them, picking her way through the boxes to the curb with a fixed smile, he thought, finally, that his heart would break. He wondered if it could literally happen, if sadness could fill the chambers like blood until finally they had to burst from it. He wouldn’t cry. He would never let them see that. And now his mother was there, pretending to be happy, and Nora, all blubbery hugs, was handing them a thermos for the ride, and Father Tim was saying they’d better be starting. In a minute they’d be gone.
Nick said he had to go to the bathroom and raced into the house, leaving them standing at the car. He walked through the empty rooms, trying to fix them in his memory too, but it felt like someone else’s house. Maybe Father Tim was right. Things passed, whether you wanted them to or not.
He went up to his father’s study and stood at the door. His mother hadn’t taken the desk and it still sat there, just the desk and the blank walls. The window was closed, and in the stale air he thought he could still smell tobacco. His chest hurt again. Why did it have to happen? He stared at the desk. He wouldn’t cry and he wouldn’t do what Father Tim had said. He wouldn’t forget anything. His father was somewhere. But not in the empty room. There was nothing left but a trace of smoke.
He heard his mother calling and went down the stairs to the car. Nora cried, but he got into the back seat, determined not to crack. He wouldn’t even look back. But when the car turned the corner, he couldn’t help himself and swiveled in his seat toward the back window. It was then he realized, trying to remember details, that something was missing. There were no reporters. It was over. There were just the boxes being loaded into a van.
Three years later, in the summer of 1953, after the death of Stalin and the murder of Beria, Walter Kotlar at last gave a press conference in Moscow. In the chess game of the Cold War, the move was meant to dismay the West, and it did, another blow after the disappearance of Burgess and Maclean. Like them, Kotlar denounced Western aggression as a threat to world peace. But his remarks were limited, and he made no reference to the circumstance of his defection. His presence was the story.
Nick had waited so long for his answer that when it came, a grainy newsclip, he felt a numb surprise that it didn’t explain anything after all. It solved a puzzle, but not the one he wanted to solve. His father looked well. There was the expected storm in the papers, the events of 1950 retold as news, and for a day Nick and his mother wondered if their lives would be exploded again. But no one called. The country had moved on. And by that time Nick had a new father and a new name, and their troubles, everything that happened to them, had become just a part of history.
Part II
THE RED MENACE
Chapter 3
April 1969
“Vanessa Redgrave’s supposed to show.”
“Super. Where?” The two boys, obviously students, looked over the iron railings toward the tall houses lining one side of the square.
“I don’t know, but she’s supposed to show. Check out the cameras.”
“Far out. We’ll be on TV.”
Eavesdropping, Nick smiled and looked toward the embassy steps, where the camera crews were setting up. The turnout was bigger than he’d expected. The day
was raw and cold, damp morning mist still hanging from the trees, but the line snaked all around Grosvenor Square, ringing the enclosed park and spilling out down Brook Street. They couldn’t all be American. The streets were still open to traffic, and the police, polite and wary, walked along the edge of the curb, asking the crowd to stay on the pavement.
The rally, like London itself, was gentle and friendly. In front of the embassy there were microphones for the demonstration speeches and Americans Against Vietnam signs, but no one broke out of line or heckled the secretaries going into the building. A few faces stared out of the upper-story windows, more curious than besieged, but no one called out to them. The confrontations and shouting belonged somewhere else. They were here to listen to speeches and then, one by one, to read the names of the dead.
Nick looked around for his LSE group, but they’d become separated earlier and were now swallowed up in the queue. One of the organizers, megaphone dangling from his neck, was moving down the line, handing out index cards.
“When you get to the mike, just read off the name and place and say ‘dead’ and then drop the card in the coffin. Got it? Don’t yell-the mike’ll pick it up. And keep it moving, okay? No stunts.”
Nick took the card. Pvt. Richard Sczeczynski. Nu Phoc, 1968. That would have been during Tet, when the body bags flooded the airport, a hundred years ago.
The organizers looked like teenagers, but then everyone in the crowd looked young to him. Earlier he had noticed a middle-aged group in drab overcoats-academics, presumably, or English radicals old enough to have tramped from Aldermaston-but everyone else seemed to have stepped out of a dorm party, smooth-faced and eager, wrapped in capes and leather and old army greatcoats. A few had peace signs painted on their foreheads. Underneath the bushy mustaches and lumberjack beards their cheeks were pink. It was a thrift shop army — cast-off shawls and buckskin fringe and tight jeans with shiny studs planted along the seams. None of them had been there.
“Excuse me,” a girl behind him said, holding out her card. “Do you have any idea how to pronounce this?”
An American voice. He looked at her-long blond hair held away from her face by an Indian headband, shoulders draped with a patterned gaucho cape-and took the card.
“Hue,” he said automatically, wondering why she’d asked. She was pretty but slightly drawn, dressed to look younger than she was. Had she been standing there all this time?
“No, the name. I mean, he’s dead-awful if I couldn’t pronounce it. I mean-”
Nick looked again at the card. “Trochazka,” he read.
“Chaw?” she said, drawing out the flat a. “Like that? Russian?”
“No, it’s a Czech name.”
“Really? Do you know that?”
Nick shrugged. “It’s a common name. Smith. Jones. Like that.”
“Common if you’re Czech,” she said. “Are you?”
Nick shook his head. “Grandmother.”
“You take it, then. I’ll never say it right. Swap, okay? Do you mind?”
Nick smiled. “Be my guest,” he said, handing her his card. He watched her face as she read it, did a double-take, and then gave a wry smile.
“Okay, you win. I can’t even start this one. Is this like Jones too?”
“No. Che-chin-ski,” he pronounced. “Polish.”
“You can tell? Just like that?”
“Well, the ‘ski’ is Polish. The rest, I don’t know. I’m just guessing.”
She looked at him and smiled. “I’m impressed.” She reached over and took back her card, grazing his fingers. “Forget the swap, though. I think I was better off the first time. Imagine, two in a row. Maybe we’re the Slavic section. How do you say yours? In Czech. Z’s and y’s and all that?”
“Warren.”
“Oh.” She smiled. “Sorry.”
“No,” he said, studying her face, her quick brown eyes meeting his without embarrassment. “They’re funny names.”
“But not to them. I know. Mine’s Chisholm, by the way. With an l.”
“Imagine what the Poles would do with that.”
She smiled. “Yes, imagine.”
He looked at her again. Wide mouth and pale skin, a trace of freckles over the bridge of her nose.
“Where are you from?” she said, the usual American-abroad question.
“New York.”
“No, I mean where here. Are you with a group?”
“LSE,” Nick said.
“You’re a student?”
He laughed at her surprise. “Too old?”
“Well, the tie-” He followed her eyes to the senior-tutor wool jacket and plain tie he’d forgotten he had on. “Are you a teacher?”
“No, I’m finishing a dissertation,” he said, the all-purpose explanation for his time away, the drift. “Late start. What about you?”
“Oh, I’m-just here.” She looked away for a second, avoiding him, and adjusted the heavy bag hanging from her shoulder, a shapeless but good soft leadier that seemed at odds with the hippie cape. When she turned back, he was still staring at her. “What?” she said.
“Nothing,” he said, catching himself. “I was-never mind.”
“What?” she said, a laugh now in her throat.
“Well, I was going to say, Do you come here often? And I realized how dumb it sounded. What I meant was, have you been to one of these before?” But what he really meant was, why are you here? He wondered if she was like the girls in Hair, floating in a haze of smoke between protest marches and concerts, interchangeable parts of the same scene. But she was looking at him again with the same frank scrutiny, anything but mindless.
“Of course,” she said simply. “I don’t understand people who don’t.”
“Even over here?” Nick said, his own doubt.
She shrugged. “It all counts. Somehow. Why do you?”
“Same reason, I guess,” he said, letting it drop.
The line moved a little now, people drawing nearer to the steps where the speakers had appeared, and he began to move with it.
“So do you always wear a tie?” she said, trying to keep his attention.
He smiled. Was she flirting with him? “I have to meet somebody after,” he said. “That’s all. Tie people.”
She looked up at him and squinted her eyes. “Tie people?”
“Parents.”
“Parents?” she said, disconcerted.
“Am I too old for that too?”
She looked at him oddly, as if his answer had thrown her, a piece from the wrong puzzle. “They live here?” she said unexpectedly.
He shook his head. “Flying visit. One meal. One tie. Not too much to ask.” He glanced at his watch, reminded of the time. Larry and his mother were expecting him in just under an hour. “What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. I-”
She seemed flustered again, but now there was a movement in the crowd, and before she could finish, people began to surge politely around them, looking down the street.
“It’s her!” someone shouted. “She came.”
Nick glanced toward the corner, where a black taxi idled as a tall woman leaned in to pay the fare. Two women with her greeted the organizers and collected their index cards, then steered her away from the photographers who had begun to move in their direction. “Miss Redgrave, over here!” She was dressed in a plain pea coat with a long muffler wrapped around her neck as camouflage, but in her high boots she towered over the other marchers, drawing attention like camera light. Now the rally had point.
She ignored the commotion at the steps and quietly joined the line not far from Nick, thanking the students who moved aside to make a place. They nodded shyly, pretending to be indifferent, but it was a face they had seen twenty feet high and soon they were staring openly, sprinkled with the same fairy dust that drew the press.
“Can you give us a statement?” one of the reporters shouted, Cockney and insistent.
“No, sorry,” she said, turning away and starin
g straight ahead, removing herself.
“And will you be speaking today?” he asked quickly.
One of the women with her waved an arm to take in the crowd. “We’re all speaking today,” she said. “Just by being here.” The students around her nodded, flattered.
Nick wondered who she was. An actress he didn’t recognize? Or a hanger-on, the willing mouthpiece?
“What about charges that demos like these are actually undermining the progress of the Paris peace talks?”
“What progress?”
“Right,” he said, smiling, finally jotting something down. “Film stars in politics?”
“Come on, Davey, not again,” the woman said, surprising Nick with the intimacy. Had they been around this dance floor before? Maybe she was famous, part of the new culture that seemed to have sprung up overnight, while he wasn’t looking, a music without history. “Everyone’s in politics,” she said, almost offhandedly. “Whether they want to be or not.”
“Even the dead, eh? These soldiers here,” he said, nodding toward the index cards. “Think they’d be pleased? Being part of this?”
There was a question, Nick thought. He wasn’t even sure how he felt, still alive.
“We honor them as victims, not soldiers,” the woman said, then stopped, aware that the reporter was writing. “That’s all now, please.”
And, surprisingly, it was. The reporter, still scribbling, nodded and started to back away, apparently satisfied with an interview that hadn’t really happened. Nick remembered the reporters in Vietnam taking the handouts from the press office, knowing they were lies, printing them anyway.
“Davey’s all right,” the woman now said busily to Redgrave, who seemed not to hear, her Valkyrie head still above the crowd.
The line continued to press from behind, drawn to limelight, and Nick felt himself pushed against the girl at his side.
“Hey, Nick!”
He turned to the yell and saw the crowd rearrange itself as Henry, from the LSE group, pushed through. He came up to them, clearly excited by the day. “Hi,” he said to the girl. “I see you found him.”
