by Tim O'Brien
“There it is,” Oscar said, and smiled. “There it positively is.”
In the morning they began to search. Oscar took charge, handing out maps and search sectors, reminding them of the stakes. “He wins, we lose. No screwups.” Sarkin Aung Wan moved out to the sun porch. She watered the geranium, put it up to catch the sun, then gazed across at the church belfry. Paul Berlin stayed away. He couldn’t explain it, and she couldn’t understand. It was more than skin-saving. It was responsibility. Either you understood responsibility or you didn’t, and she didn’t. Nor did the lieutenant. The old man refused to listen when Doc tried to explain things. He coughed, blinked, then looked away.
“Mercy,” he mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing. Leave me be.”
So they began without him. Paul Berlin was assigned to the tourist and commercial areas in the first arrondissement, and he spent the day working his way up and down a hundred unfamiliar streets. It seemed impossible. He tried hard to inspect each face, each building or park bench, but in the end he only walked, letting his feet do the looking. He spent two hours in the Louvre, then wandered up through the open gardens to Rue de Rivoli, then followed a chain of twisting streets to Place Vendôme. After lunch he doubled back toward the east, using the sun as a guide, ignoring his maps. His feet ached. He’d forgotten how it was.
Paris, he kept thinking. Peace and harmony and happiness. And now it was gone. He stopped once for a Coke, sipping it slowly and watching the late afternoon crowds make their way home, then he joined the flow across Pont Royal and returned to the apartment. Doc and Eddie were already there, soaking their feet. They didn’t look up. “Nothing,” Eddie said.
It went that way for days: avoiding police, worrying that the apartment might be discovered, long hours on the streets, fatigue that produced crazy dreams at night. With the lieutenant still sullen and withdrawn, Oscar took firm command. “The dude’s out there,” he kept saying. “He’s hidin’ out like a skunk an’ I smell him.” At night they took turns staking out the major railway and métro stops. They adjusted the daily search sectors, combed through the visitor rolls at the Palais Royal, checked the hotels. But they found nothing. It was as if Cacciato, if he existed at all, had somehow torn himself free of physical fact.
“He’s got to eat,” Oscar would say. “Don’t he? He’s got to eat an’ sleep and wash his undies like the rest of us.”
But there was nothing.
Walking the streets, Paul Berlin tried to make a game out of it. A puzzle. What had brought Cacciato here? Why Paris? Why not Madrid or Brussels or New York? Details: the density of the city, gray and brown and yellow stone, the temper of things, rubbish in the river, but still an oddly beautiful river, the things seen and heard and felt. What was Cacciato after?
Paul Berlin looked hard, paying close attention, but the details only looked back at him.
At the apartment, Sarkin Aung Wan and the lieutenant refused to have any part in it. They spent their time together, talking softly, avoiding the others. Paul Berlin tried not to look at her. Partly it was guilt. Guilty if you fulfilled old obligations, guilty if you abandoned them. Sometimes he would catch her gazing at him, her eyes full of pity—not quite pity, not exactly, but something very close.
“We’ll still do it,” he told her one evening. The others were asleep. “I swear, as soon as this thing is ended.”
She tried to slide away but he grabbed her wrist.
“Can’t you understand that? Just give me a chance to finish all this.”
“No.”
“What? No what?”
She pulled her arm free. “Spec Four, you have the alternatives. It is time to choose.”
“But, look, it’s not realistic to just run off.”
“Realistic! Is it realistic to make our apartment into a military headquarters? To chase a poor simple boy … Is that realistic? I would rather be unrealistic.”
“But I promise—”
“Oh, I know about promises,” she said quietly. “Spec Four, you are full of such promise. Promise and promise. Promise unending.”
He watched her move away. He tried to imagine it differently, he tried hard, but the power to make a wish was no longer the power to make it happen. It was a failure of imagination.
The next morning he found Cacciato.
It was … oh, it was in Les Halles. Among the oranges and turbot and baby pigs dangling from their hocks, among bins of celery and pushcarts piled high with spring turnips; there, where hawkers shouted out come-ons and where women scrambled for freshness in their daily bread; amid the fruit wagons and rows of neck-wrung chickens, halves of warm beef open to flies, clogged gutters and garbage, crowds pushing through troughs of grapes and melons and string beans—there, in midmorning market on a spring day.
Cacciato, no question.
He was alone. Rosy cheeks and a happy smile. A wicker basket on one elbow. Still chubby, still pink, still young and healthy and scrubbed.
It was Cacciato.
Stepping back, then freezing. Paul Berlin felt no surprise. No great emotion. It happened as it should have happened—a simple, easy thing.
Cacciato: the same pink spot at the crown of the skull. A little bigger than he remembered him. Sparrow-eyed. Munching on gum, round-faced, misshapen.
Pausing now and then to squeeze a melon or a head of lettuce, Cacciato moved easily through the crowd. People smiled and nodded at him. He seemed in no hurry, stopping once to buy bananas, another time to buy fish and sausage. At each booth the hawkers would have pleasant words for him, and Cacciato would smile and wave and continue on. He might have been a boy sent by his mother to do the day’s shopping.
Paul Berlin followed at a distance.
Staying with the crowds, he tracked him through a huge iron pavilion and then down Rue Baltard to the Fontaine des Innocents. Cacciato stopped there, pulled out a loaf of bread, broke it in half and began feeding the pigeons. Methodically, as though it were a job to be done, he threw out crumbs until the entire loaf was gone, then he picked up his basket and moved down a chain of winding streets into a part of Paris that Paul Berlin had never seen. It was poverty. Thickset roofs clung to one another as if designed to block out sunlight; everywhere there were tenements running in bleak rows like barracks, one to the next. There was no beauty in it, no elegance or charm.
But Cacciato didn’t notice. Whistling now, he turned into a narrow cobbled lane roofed with drying laundry. He paused a moment, half turning, then he shifted the wicker basket to his left elbow and entered an old stucco building.
Paul Berlin felt calm. The road ended where it surely would have ended, a dead-end alley. No exits and no tricks.
Without hesitation, he followed the lane to its end. It was an old hotel. A faded blue and white sign gave the rates and the proprietor’s name.
He rang the bell, waited, rang it again, then tried the door. It was unlocked.
Inside, the lobby had the smell of dust. There were a few tattered chairs, a sofa, a stained rug, and broken windows. The place was abandoned.
He waited a moment, listening, then he heard the whistling again. It came from the ceiling. An old, familiar song. Climbing the stairs, Paul Berlin found himself humming. The words to the song wouldn’t quite come. What was it? He tried for silence, a light foot, steadiness. Billy Boy, Billy Boy, he found himself humming, climbing, where have you gone, charming Billy?
The stairs ended in a long hallway. There were no windows or carpets. No lighting except for what came from the lobby below.
The whistling was closer now. He followed it, humming along, stopping to listen at the numbered doors. At the end of the hallway he found it. The door was painted bright green.
He pushed the door open and stepped in.
Cacciato smiled. He was in his underwear, sitting on a cot, peeling carrots into a metal pan. Like a baby, clean and smooth and plump.
He smiled.
He put the knife down, and the carrot,
and got up and put his hand out. The hand was soft. The smile was immaculate. A baby’s smile, beguiling and meaningless. “Hi,” he said.
“You found him?” Doc said. “Cacciato?”
Paul Berlin, who discovered the truth was simple, handed Oscar a slip of paper with the hotel’s name and address. The lieutenant covered his eyes.
“You found him?”
“Simple.”
Doc laughed. “What … what’d he say? Cacciato.”
“Nothing.”
“I mean, how did he explain it? Didn’t he—?”
“Nothing,” Paul Berlin said. He felt himself shaking. “Not a thing.”
“Leaving, walking away? Didn’t he say why? Why he did it?”
“Nothing!”
“Take it easy, man.”
“Nothing,” Paul Berlin said loudly, almost yelling. “A dummy. No reasons, no answers. Nothing. Just a baby.”
“Easy.”
“A big dumb baby.”
“Relax. What’d you expect?”
“Nothing.”
Imagine it: The Majestic Hotel is darkened like a theater stage. In the Salle des Fêtes, the hotel’s old conference room, there is the sound of an audience that isn’t there. Feet shuffling, a cough, the murmur of voices. Somewhere a champagne bottle is opened. Light applause. Then trumpets and drums, a diplomatic flourish.
Spotlight: It falls on a large circular table topped with green baize and rimmed with chrome. The table is just over thirteen feet in diameter, one hundred and thirty-five feet in circumference. An invisible line divides the table into two precise halves. Around each of these halves there are eight leather armchairs. Sixteen chairs in all. On the table before each chair is a microphone and headset. There are no flags, no nameplates or other identifying symbols.
Spotlight expands: Imagine marble floors and marble pillars, gilt ornamentation, drapes descending forty-foot walls, an arched ceiling, an enormous Louis XIV tapestry depicting birds in flight.
Paul Berlin enters from the right, Sarkin Aung Wan from the left.
Spotlight contracts: a narrow beam focusing on the green circular table.
Paul Berlin takes a seat at the giant table, on the half closer to the tapestry; Sarkin Aung Wan walks to the far side, bows, then sits. They put on the headsets. There is a squeak, the sound of amplification, as each of them tests a microphone.
Then a pause. The parties do not look at each other. The conference hall is hushed—the echo of an audience no longer present.
Without pleasantries, Sarkin Aung Wan unfolds a piece of parchment paper and begins to read.
“During the many months it has taken us to reach this table”—but it is not her voice, it is the voice of translation, a man’s voice, precise and unaccented and impersonal—”we have traveled some eight thousand six hundred American miles. As irony will have it, this number has its nearly exact complement in American lives lost over that same period. I find no humor in this. I find it sad. But this sadness is neither inevitable nor unending; we might still develop a common vision of happiness, and by our action here we might begin the realization of that vision.
“It is easy, of course, to fear happiness. There is often complacency in the acceptance of misery. We fear parting from our familiar roles. We fear the consequences of such a parting. We fear happiness because we fear failure. But we must overcome these fears. We must be brave. It is one thing to speculate about what might be. It is quite another to act in behalf of our dreams, to treat them as objectives that are achievable and worth achieving. It is one thing to run from unhappiness; it is another to take action to realize those qualities of dignity and well-being that are the true standards of the human spirit.
“Spec Four Paul Berlin: I am asking for a break from violence. But I am also asking for a positive commitment. You yearn for normality—an average house in an average town, a garden, perhaps a wife, the chance to grow old. Realize these things. Give up this fruitless pursuit of Cacciato. Forget him. Live now the dream you have dreamed. See Paris and enjoy it. Be happy. It is possible. It is within reach of a single decision.
“This is not a plea for placidness of mind or feebleness of spirit. It is a plea for the opposite: that, like your father, you would build fine houses; that, like your town, you would endure and grow and produce good things; that you would live well. For just as happiness is more than the absence of sadness, so is peace infinitely more than the absence of war. Even the refugee must do more than flee. He must arrive. He must return at last to a world as it is, however much in conflict with his hopes, and he must then do what he can to edge reality toward what he has dreamed, to change what he can change, to go beyond the wish or the fantasy. ‘We had fed the heart on fantasies,’ says the poet, ‘the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.’ Spec Four Paul Berlin, I urge you to act. Having dreamed a marvelous dream, I urge you to step boldly into it, to join your dream and to live it. Do not be deceived by false obligation. You are obliged, by all that is just and good, to pursue only the felicity that you yourself have imagined. Do not let fear stop you. Do not be frightened by ridicule or censure or embarrassment, do not fear name-calling, do not fear the scorn of others. For what is true obligation? Is it not the obligation to pursue a life at peace with itself?
“You have come far. The journey to this table has been dangerous. You have taken many risks. You have been brave beyond your wildest expectations. And now it is time for a final act of courage. I urge you: March proudly into your own dream.”
Silence, a murmur of assenting voices.
Spotlight shifts: across the green-topped table, a narrowing of the beam. Paul Berlin waits, then gently taps the microphone. His face is tanned and takes the light well. It is an angular, handsome face. The brow drops flat and solid. The nose is distinguished. The lips, slightly parted, seem on the verge of a shy smile, but his manner is not shy. Reserved, perhaps, but still confident. There is grace in the way he lights his cigarette, holding it as if it isn’t there, adjusting his papers, glancing up for a moment, nodding politely, barely, a diplomatic courtesy. He wears a blue suit with the most subtle pinstripes. His tie is gray, his shirt is white. In the spotlight, his light brown hair seems almost blond. His hands are steady. His eyes, set wide, are equally steady. No signs of timidity or bashfulness.
And when he speaks, leaning into the microphone, his voice is resonant and firm. A diplomat’s voice.
“Friends,” he begins. The amplification system whines, and he moves back slightly: “Friends, I don’t pretend to be expert on matters of obligation, either moral or contractual, but I do know when I feel obliged. Obligation is more than a claim imposed on us; it is a personal sense of indebtedness. It is a feeling, an acknowledgment, that through many prior acts of consent we have agreed to perform certain future acts. I have that feeling. I make that acknowledgment. By my prior acts—acts of consent—I have bound myself to performing subsequent acts. I put on a uniform. I boarded a plane. I accepted a promotion and the responsibilities that went with it. I joined in the pursuit of Cacciato. I marched. I voted once to continue the pursuit. I persisted. I urged the others to persist. I tied myself to this mission, promising to see it to its end. These were explicit consents. But beyond them were many tacit promises: to my family, my friends, my town, my country, my fellow soldiers. These promises, too, accumulated. I was not misled. I was not gulled. On the contrary, I believe … I feel … that I am being asked to perform a final service that is entirely compatible with what I had promised earlier. A debt, a legitimate debt, is being called in. No trickery, no change in terms. I knew what I was getting into. I knew it might be unpleasant. And I made promises with that full understanding. The promises were made freely. True, the moral climate was imperfect; there were pressures, constraints, but nonetheless I made binding choices. Again, this has nothing whatever to do with politics or principle or matters of justice. My obligation is to people, not to principle or politics or justice.”
Paul Berlin pauses
here, clears his throat, reaches for a glass of water.
“But, please. I don’t want to overemphasize all this. More than any positive sense of obligation, I confess that what dominates is the dread of abandoning all that I hold dear. I am afraid of running away. I am afraid of exile. I fear what might be thought of me by those I love. I fear the loss of their respect. I fear the loss of my own reputation. Reputation, as read in the eyes of my father and mother, the people in my hometown, my friends. I fear being an outcast. I fear being thought of as a coward. I fear that even more than cowardice itself.
“Are these fears wrong? Are they stupid? Or are they healthy and right? I have been told to ignore my fear of censure and embarrassment and loss of reputation. But would it not be better to accept those fears? To yield to them? If inner peace is the true objective, would I win it in exile?
“Perhaps now you can see why I stress the importance of viewing obligations as a relationship between people, not between one person and some impersonal idea or principle. An idea, when violated, cannot make reprisals. A principle cannot refuse to shake my hand. Only people can do that. And it is this social power, the threat of social consequences, that stops me from making a full and complete break. Peace of mind is not a simple matter of pursuing one’s own pleasure; rather, it is inextricably linked to the attitudes of other human beings, to what they want, to what they expect. The real issue is how to find felicity within limits. Within the context of our obligations to other people. We all want peace. We all want dignity and domestic tranquillity. But we want these to be honorable and lasting. We want a peace that endures. We want a peace we can be proud of. Even in imagination we must obey the logic of what we started. Even in imagination we must be true to our obligations, for, even in imagination, obligation cannot be outrun. Imagination, like reality, has its limits.”
Full spotlight: Sarkin Aung Wan and Paul Berlin stand, stack their papers, then wait. They do not look at each other. There is no true negotiation. There is only the statement of positions.
