by Belva Plain
At that they both fell silent. Voices from outside, with ominous distant roar, had abruptly drowned the pleasant ripple of conversation in this peaceful room. For several minutes with this roaring in their heads, neither Paul nor Ilse spoke again.
And then, fortuitously, there came a nearby ring of jovial laughter. A group of young people, rising from their table, were taking merry leave of one another, and this laughter of theirs scolded Paul, reminding him that this was a day and a place that they had come to for gaiety. May in Italy, after all!
“Come,” he said, “let’s take a little walk down to the shore. Then we’ll start home. Wait till you see where I’m staying. It’s a paradise.”
Westward toward Lake Maggiore and toward the sun they drove. The car sped with the wind past old stone villages strung along the narrow roadway, up hills and around curves, past wrought-iron gates at which stone lions guarded the pink- and white- and lemon-colored villas that overlooked the water.
Ilse sighed with pleasure and said, “I feel as if I’d been away from home and work for weeks instead of only hours.”
The sky was melting into stripes of mauve and pink above the Villa Jessica’s tiled roof as they turned into the drive and up the easy incline between ranks of flowering bougainvillea. In the warm light the stucco walls of the, house were also touched with the sun’s last fading pink, and the windows gleamed like mirrors.
When the front door was opened, one looked straight through the hallway and through the door that opened onto the terrace at the rear.
“Come out here before we go upstairs,” Paul said. “I just want you to look.”
The vast lake lay still as a pool. The perfect lawn, now in evening shade, was almost black and would be soft as fur to the touch. Lou, the spaniel, hearing Paul’s voice, came bounding up past the rose beds.
“The roses!” exclaimed Ilse. “They’re as big as cabbages.”
“I have a thousand things to show you. Oh, Ilse, if you’ll stay long enough, I’ll show you all of Italy.”
“You forget, I was here before.”
“During the war? That doesn’t count. Have you seen Florence, Venice, Capri? Have you ever taken a steamer ride around this lake?”
Smiling, she shook her head.
“Well, then. We have all that to do. Now come upstairs.”
He had moved himself from the smaller room with the single bed into a larger one. Here stood an enormous old bed, carved, painted, gilded, and hung with a canopy and side curtains of silver-blue brocade. Elaborate ornament like this was not to Paul’s taste; in a home of his own he surely would not have had it, but it belonged in this room, as did the marble fireplace, which they would not be needing unless they were to stay for the winter, something he would not let himself think about. There was a marquetry desk for letter writing. There were books and current magazines on a table, upon which the maid had also put an arrangement of those roses large as cabbages.
Tonight they would sleep together in that bed. He hadn’t begun to realize how much he had missed her, hadn’t truly realized it until this minute now when he could see her, hear her, and touch her, still strong, still slender, firm where she ought to be and soft where she ought to be, and so dearly to be desired.
“Unpack your things now. Get it over with,” he said. “It’ll be almost time for a little supper soon. Would you like to eat outdoors on the terrace or inside?” His thoughts and his tongue were whirling so, he could hardly keep up with either. “I hope you brought something to wear to a party. Some friends are giving one tomorrow. People I met through my Roman lawyer. They have a place across the lake. We’ll go by boat, just a short ride, but beautiful at night coming back in moonlight.”
“I know you well enough to come prepared,” Ilse told him, as she unfolded clothes. “Where Paul is, there are always parties.”
He stepped out to the balcony. The sun had fallen just a moment before, dropped out of sight behind the burly masses of the mountains whose tops now drew penciled lines across the gray sky. A sailboat moving slowly across the water left an unwavering streak behind it, black against lighter black, as on a Japanese print. Everything had been reduced to a minimum, light, sky, water, and the little boat growing smaller as it moved away.
Tomorrow, he thought, we shall take that steamer tour of the lake. Then we’ll drive over to Venice, stopping at Verona and Padua on the way.
His head was filled with plans, and his heart was full.
If I had to go back over my life and pick out any space of three weeks, I wouldn’t be able to find one in which I had been more content than I’ve been in these last three, Paul thought, as he sat in a kind of tropical trance watching Ilse plow through fifty laps in the pool.
They had followed most of his design, having seen the hill towns of Tuscany, explored Florence, ridden the Amalfi Drive, examined almost every corner of the Vatican Museum—quite a feat!—swum at the Lido, and even traveled down to Ravenna.
Now the morning shone. On the lower level of the lawn a whirling hose threw spray like a spangled streamer into the wind. Up here Ilse’s arms rose and fell to the strong rhythm of the crawl. When she climbed out and sat on the edge, glittering drops fell about her. There wasn’t a curve in her back. Her white suit clung like skin. A woman is blessed to have a body like that, Paul was thinking when she hailed him.
“Why don’t you go in? What’s wrong with you today?”
“Not a thing except laziness. And besides, the New York paper’s just arrived, and I want to see it. You know I get it at least a week late, anyway.”
“Well, I need a few more laps.”
“Go ahead. I’ll go up to read.”
A small pile of newspapers and several magazines to which he subscribed lay ready for him on the table near the balustrade. Eager for home news and accustomed to rapid reading anyway, he was always able in rather few minutes to get the “feel” of events. He read: Firebombs at the University of Colorado; Explosions at the University of Michigan; Thirty incidents in Detroit this past year alone. The New York Times reported: “A seven-hundred-fifty-pound bomb exploded today during loading operations at Port Chicago’s Navy Ammunition Shipping Base.” An unexploded bomb had been found at the Oakland Army Base. After another series of bombings, a letter sent to United Press International contained a long complaint about racism, sexism, pollution, and imperialism: “In death-directed America there is only one way to a life of love and freedom.” Paul’s head was swimming as anger mounted. And he skimmed through the red-hot words. “… attack, attack and destroy … build a just society … revolution.” Then he threw the paper on the floor.
All this was actually not new. It had rather become routine to read about the bombing of the ROTC, the invasion of the draft-board offices, and all the rest. That was the worst of it, just that it had become routine and there seemed no way to end it.
The color bled out of the day.
“Revolution,” he said aloud. “Yes, as in the Soviet Union, as in Cuba or China. Oh, yes, a life of love and freedom. Stupid bastards.”
“Who?” asked Ilse, wrapping a terry robe around herself as she appeared at the top of the stairs.
“Who? These. Read. I can’t even talk about it, I get so mad. Oh, here’s a letter from Leah. Oh, God, oh, no.” He groaned.
“What is it? What’s happened?”
“Tom. In Vietnam. His car was just behind one that hit a mine, and he’s had a face wound, a bad one. They’re bringing him back to the States for surgery. He’s a handsome man too, handsome as Tim, but different, without the personality and the charm, for all that’s worth.” He read on. “Oh, poor Meg. As if she hadn’t enough with Tim on her mind. God, this war. This war.” And turning over the pile, he came upon an envelope addressed in Theo’s precise script. “Here’s something from Theo,” he said, wondering how the man managed a pen as well as he did. When he had finished the letter, he read it again, so absorbed in what he had read that he was unaware of Ilse’s expectancy
.
“You look puzzled,” she said.
“I’m thinking. Of course, there may be nothing to it. Listen to this: That professor, the one Steve—that’s their son, the one who’s always in trouble—admires so much, is being sought by the FBI. Apparently, he’s been involved in some of these explosions. Another man in the group, an ex-priest, has been caught in a safe haven, some young lawyer’s house in Rhode Island. A couple of students escaped from the house and are being sought too.” Paul read on, frowning and muttering, “A mess. It seems that the other son, this kid’s brother—I don’t know why I should call him a kid when he’s twenty-two—was in California and went to some commune where he’d been living for a year or more to see him. And he had disappeared. Been gone for several months. So putting two and two together, he may well be wherever Tim Powers is.”
“Very farfetched,” Ilse cautioned. “You can’t put the numbers together when you don’t even know what the numbers are.”
“Well, still I can say it’s awful. Awful. Theo writes that Iris is frantic.”
“Paul, your pain is written on your face, and I don’t like to see it. Oh, I don’t mean to be hard on you, my dearest, I only want to remind you, as I used to do long ago, that she’s an adult and no responsibility of yours. Even if you had a normal relationship, she wouldn’t really be, but she certainly isn’t now.”
Although he heard Ilse clearly, Paul was again thinking of, and overwhelmed by, the clash and reunion of opposites. Donal and Timothy, father and son, the one who, loving money more than anything, supported the Nazis for their industry and the Arabs for their oil, the other who despises money and claims to support the cause of brotherhood, have come together full circle at last, in horror and blood.
Then, rousing himself to answer Ilse, he sighed. “You’re right, of course, you’re right.”
“Look around you. That’s what you keep telling me to do, isn’t it? Don’t let anything spoil one day for you, especially when it’s something you can’t do anything about.”
“You’re right,” he repeated.
Something had happened in his head, nevertheless. A remarkable change of mood had abruptly swept him, and he found himself thinking that he’d been away a long, long time. This, if he were to stay here, would be the second summer. A dry, burning summer it would be. At home now, in the country at Meg’s, tree frogs would be chirping in the evenings. Along Park Avenue tulips would tremble in the cool spring wind. Maybe this was some ancient tribal memory received from generations of dwellers in the north, a memory of a different kind of spring, a rejoicing at the end of the barren winter and the long cold. Whatever the cause, he was feeling at this moment a totally unexpected stab of longing for home.
Then he spoke reasonably to himself: You know very well that Theo’s letter is the reason why you suddenly want to go home.… If only Ilse would go with him!
And the day that had been so smooth, so free of burden, only a few minutes before while he had been watching Ilse in the pool and before the mail had come, that day was now a tangle of contradictions. If only she would go with him!
Then he rebuked himself. Don’t be a fool, Paul. Take what you have. Take what is, what’s here right now, just as Ilse told you to do. And deliberately, he smiled, forcing the effort.
“Since we’re going for a sail this afternoon, shall we have an early lunch here or shall we take a basket lunch to eat on the boat?”
And the halcyon days resumed.
One morning in June a man’s scorched body was found on a highway outside of Milan. A bundle of dynamite sticks was still in his hand, and both of his legs were blown off. Apparently, he had intended to blow up the power station and had blown himself up instead. His clothing was that of a workman in poor straits, and the name found among his possessions in the rickety car parked nearby meant nothing to anyone. But the false passports did mean something, sending the authorities into frantic action. Police and army, Justice Department and investigators of every description, went scrambling and scouring through the land. The newspapers, as usual, kept reporting and repeating the same meager clues, all of which seemed to lead nowhere.
In the second week, however, there came stupendous news, shaking the country from end to end. Early in the morning, before breakfast, Paul was on the telephone talking to his friend in Rome, who had called in high excitement. When he hung up at last, he hurried to satisfy Ilse’s curiosity.
“Can you imagine who the man was? Arturo Martillini, the millionaire. Billionaire! Blown himself up. Good lord, he owns—owned—just about everything you can think of, inherited acres, thousands of them, urban real estate, factories, a steel mill, you name it. The whole social crowd is in shock over this. My friend tells me everyone has always known he’s been way out Left, but only in the fashionable sense that we know at home. Radical chic, you know what I mean. But one doesn’t conceive of such people going about with dynamite.”
Ilse reflected. “People like me who suffered under fascism have generally thought of the far Right as the ultimate evil, and the Left somehow more idealistic, more virtuous, no matter what it does. And still terror is terror and dead is dead, isn’t it, no matter who does it?”
“You wonder what in the man’s life could have led him into something like that.”
Ilse continued her reflections. “I’ve got some friends in Mossad—you know, they say the Israeli intelligence is one of the cleverest in the world—and I’ve heard bits and pieces about money coming from someone in Italy, someone with a bottomless pocketbook who finances the German Baader-Meinhof gang and the PLO training camp in South Yemen and a dozen other things. In South Yemen practically everybody’s there, Swedes, Japanese, even the IRA. I’ve told you about it.”
“And you think this is the man?”
“It’s not impossible. In fact, it’s very possible.”
“This is like first-rate espionage fiction. Let’s get hold of a newspaper right away.”
A queer thing happened. The front page displayed a photograph of Martillini that startled Paul. It seemed to him that he must have seen that face somewhere before. He examined it with care, trying to remember. This was a posed photograph, so the mouth had an amiable smile, yet the eyes had none. The eyes were striking. Where had he seen such eyes?
“What are you studying?” asked Ilse, looking over Paul’s shoulder.
“Nothing in particular. Just reading,” he replied, not wanting to disclose the sudden thought that had come to him: Jordaine.
He looks like Jordaine, which is of course absurd. I saw the man only a couple of times at Meg’s. How could I, why should I, remember him? Besides, it makes me sick even to think of him and his cynical “game” with Iris.…
During the next few days each issue of the paper brought more startling information about the dead man. He had gone all over the world, linking the Libyans to the Japanese and the Soviets and the Cubans; he bought arms, provided safe houses, financed terrorist training camps from Prague to Beirut to Cuba. He knew everyone from Habash to Guevara to Castro. He’d been in South America to learn from the Tupamaros, who incidentally, Ilse told Paul, were linked to the Palestinians.
“Did you know that?” she asked him.
“How would I know? It seems that a lot of other people who should have known didn’t know either. Now it comes out that he was in Havana in 1966 at that big congress where the worldwide workers’ movement and students’ movement were united.”
“Al Fatah was there too,” said Ilse.
“And with all this the bastard was living the life of a billionaire.”
The newspapers and weeklies were delighting in descriptions of Martillini’s lavish, titillating wealth: an estate in Liechtenstein—a tax haven—a mountain lodge in Switzerland, a winter retreat in southern Spain, and a splendid villa on Lake Garda with a garageful of Rolls-Royces, a beach, a yacht, magnificent gardens, and on the property, a private lake stocked with swans. He had a special fondness for swans.
Pau
l put the magazine down.
He had a special fondness for swans.…
Somewhere, sometime, he had heard that. Where? Who could have had a special fondness for swans?
“It’s a funny thing about memory,” he said. “You know you know a thing and you know it’s got to be in your head, because it comes to the tip of your tongue and then slides back up to wherever it’s been hiding in your head.”
“What is it you’re not remembering?”
“Swans. What can it be that I want to remember about them?”
“I can’t imagine, but it will come to you. It always does.”
“Probably sometime in the middle of the night.”
“Please don’t wake me up when it does, will you?”
“I promise. Anyway, it’s probably not important.”
A few days later Paul had an urge. “How would you like to drive over to Lake Garda to have a look at Martillini’s place?” he asked Ilse.
She was less than enthusiastic. “They’d never let you near it with all the investigation going on.”
“Just to drive by would be enough. I’d like to have a look.”
“That’s silly curiosity.”
“Okay, so it is. But it’s a beautiful drive, anyway.”
“Well, all right, I’ll go. But I still think it’s silly.”
Shortly, then, they were on the road in the Ferrari heading eastward. In Brescia they stopped for lunch where Ilse, who hated to shop, decided it was time to get a few presents to take back to Israel. Paul followed her in and out of the fine shops, where foreign tourists and vacationing Italians were buying silk and leather and expensive trinkets. In her quick, decisive way, knowing precisely what she wanted, she collected scarves and gloves while he stood miserably behind her, with the question When are you leaving? unasked because he did not want to hear the answer.
They got back into the car and were soon off the main road and into the villa country.
