The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART TWO

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PART THREE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  PART FOUR

  1

  2

  3

  4

  About the Author

  FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2003

  Copyright © 1987 by Ward Just

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Just, Ward S.

  The American ambassador.

  “A Richard Todd book”—

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-395-42694-4

  ISBN 0-618-34078-5 (pbk.)

  I. Title.

  PS3560.U75A79 1987 813'.54 86-20126

  eISBN 978-0-544-32660-6

  v1.0214

  An excerpt from this book originally appeared in the Winter 1986 issue of TriQuarterly, a publication of Northwestern University.

  The quotation from Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” on [>], is from Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

  TO SARAH

  Prologue

  YOU ASKED ME about their corruption. The occasions that come most easily to mind are Thanksgivings. You don’t have them where you come from. They’re an American tradition begun, oh, three hundred and fifty years ago; more. A feast to celebrate the harvest after the killer winter of 1621. Something about Thanksgiving brought out their decay, the utter carelessness and ignorance with which they view the world. Giving thanks, they were at their most sentimental. Of course it was the ambassador’s favorite holiday. He always proposed the same toast, a quotation from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces. . . .

  Strange indeed, my angel.

  Thanksgiving 1979, we were in Paris. Halfway through dinner he had an inspiration. He thought we needed a history lesson, mother and me. We’d take a couple of days and visit some of the War One cemeteries and monuments. Mother looked at him in surprise and said in her sarcastic way, Oh, great! Grrrreat! That means she thinks it’s a terrific idea; it’s the way they talk to each other, always have. He leaned across the table, his fat mouth full of French turkey, and looked at me. I suppose he thought we could be boys together. But I looked back at him with no expression at all and shrugged, Whatever you say. Whenever I do that, it irritates the shit out of him. He thought for a minute and said that if we would bear with him for a couple of days, then he’d agree to stop for the night near Épernay and we could drink Champagne with dinner. Mother laughed and said, Right on! Their solution to everything is to have an expensive meal and drink Champagne.

  We set out a few days later in an embassy car. I would have liked to beg off, but I didn’t have any money; and he wouldn’t give me any, even if I had asked, which of course I would never do. And in a way, I didn’t mind going, to see how he would approach it. How the ambassador’s moral vision would cope with the Western Front. Nothing’s left to the imagination, and I wondered what he’d say, standing in the cold surrounded by gravestones. He has a theory about everything.

  My angel, we are in your part of the world. So bring the killing grounds into your mind’s eye: the low hills, the sudden valleys, the irregular woods, the milky sky. It’s cold, you can see your breath. Observe him, a tallish American, slightly stooped. He thinks of himself as one of them, for he, too, has known battle, having been a casualty; an incident in Africa, years before. He was wounded then and as a result his back gives him trouble. His wife stands beside him. You know immediately that they are married, and have been married for many years. There is similarity in their postures: she, too, looks slightly stooped. He is talking and she is looking at him, her head cocked; she is smiling, even though nothing he is saying is amusing. She touches his arm and they walk off together, alone.

  We went first to the Somme Cemetery, fourteen acres, 1837 dead. Then we went to the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, forty-two acres, 2288 dead. The Aisne-Marne is near Belleau Wood, and he insisted that we walk through that. He bought a guidebook so that we could understand the flow of the battle. “Flow of the battle,” his words; the great river of Western civilization. On the way to the Oise-Aisne Cemetery—thirty-six acres, 6012 dead—we stopped at the Château-Thierry monument, built by the same firm that built Washington, D.C., chunks of marble piled one on top of the other. It looked like a Roman ruin that you’d find in Palestine or Libya. All rectangles, except for an occasional pillar; imperialist realism. He was driving like a madman and near dark we got to the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery. Bow your heads, ladies and gentlemen. Say a prayer. This was the greatest boneyard of them all, one hundred and thirty acres! A grave every three and a half feet! 13,246 stiffs.

  In ten hours we’d seen twenty-five thousand graves, an infantry division of dead. Superb. It was really superb. All those white crosses, and bones under each cross. No monuments to the civilians, however; this was exclusively for the soldiers, and the higher the rank, the gaudier the monument. One of them reminded me of the bell tower at my old school in Massachusetts, bought and paid for by an alumnus, a Boston banker. Banker’s Tower, a hundred and fifty feet high; it looked like a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot hard-on. It was where we beat the shit out of that English teacher, that time I told you about, Mel’s revenge. These reminded me of that. Same thing, same thing exactly. I looked at the plots and wondered if it was true that the hair and fingernails continue to grow, while the brain, testicles, liver, heart, and eyes become dust. There were people here and there at the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery, old people standing around at attention. A tableau vivant, the ambassador called it. I imagined the ground beginning to move, caving and splitting, releasing a gust of noxious gas, and the corpses rising in a great wail, all bones and hair and nails, and all of us dancing, a boogie of our own time; all of us locked in an embrace.

  Can’t you see it?

  Back in the embassy car, she took the wheel. He was reading some book and quoting passages about how the British troops were playing cricket at Flanders while the shells flew overhead. They played cricket listening to the explosions and the screams of their comrades. Haw, haw, those English. Well bowled, Wilfred! Dinka-doo, baby. It was pathetic. And by then we’d gotten away from Épernay, so he didn’t get his great meal with the wine of the region. That was the good part. They drank Champagne of course but it wasn’t the same because it wasn’t the wine of the region.

  I said it sounded to me like blood was the wine of the region.

  You have a point, son, the ambassador said.

  They never shut up during dinner. They talked about the cemeteries and monuments we’d seen, and what the Great War meant. They talked as if it ought to have some great meaning, something beyond itself, an epiphany, boomlay boomlay boomlay boom. But I couldn’t understand what they thought it was, except the simple fact that a couple of million sons of bitches died for empire. The ambassador said, The nineteenth century died, right here on the Western Front. Uh-huh. They are
not very original people, the ambassador and his wife; the ambassador drops centuries the way other people drop names. The British upper crust, he said; their ruling class destroyed, a generation lost. I thought, What a darn shame. All those la-di-da peers, dead in the mud. Oh, dear. Well, it was their empire. Why shouldn’t they die for it? No tears, please.

  Well, I said, why did it happen?

  I wanted him to explain it to me, as best he could. He’d read so much about it, it’s like a hobby with him, stamp collecting, furniture making, the Great War. The library in the house on O Street is filled with books on the First War. A few of them discuss the economic causes, and I thought he might address those. Assign some weight, give them specific gravity. For instance, Who profited? But he didn’t say anything about it. He seemed to feel that fate played a hand. He said, Arrogance, ignorance. Things went out of control.

  And they wanted it so badly, he said.

  I just looked at him. It was the only thing he’d said all day long that made any sense, though not the sense that he intended.

  Next day. Verdun. A three-star graveyard, worth a journey. Six months of fighting, a quarter of a million dead. Cold as shit, north wind, rain, and fog, an ideal day to view the remains. We walked through the Ossuaire, then out again. They just looked, didn’t say much. I kept the conversation going, determined to be light. I was reading from the guidebook, the circumstances of the legend of the Tranchée des Baionettes, an infantry regiment buried by German artillery, only the ends of their rifle barrels and bayonets visible at the end. You don’t want to hear about it, French nostalgia. La gloire.

  I was reading aloud, and suddenly saw myself in the trench. What would I have done? I continued to read automatically, but I was imagining the smoke and the flame, and the explosions, the officers’ shouts. I was thinking of the Ukrainian Machno, Lenin’s friend. Everyone loved Machno. No one dared attack Machno, even in 1918 when the Russians were slaughtering each other, and no one was safe. Machno’s austere slogan: “Kill all civil servants. Kill them without prejudice, no matter what party they belong to or what government gave them their posts.” I closed the book and watched them walk away a little distance. He was more stooped than usual. Mother had her arm around his waist and was talking earnestly at him, her there-there now-now tone. His head was bowed and he kept nodding. When I approached, they walked off again; a classified conversation.

  Of course I knew what it was about. He had been silent all morning, after seeing the paper. A new development in Teheran, the Revolutionary Guards were getting nasty. They were threatening the lives of Americans! Obviously he knew many of the people in the embassy, the ones taken hostage—though hostage is a strange term for people whose job it was to spy, no more and no less, who invented the tyrant Pahlevi, installed him as shah, paid him, armed him, and advised him, lawyer to client. I would call them prisoners of war. The idea seemed to be that they were neutrals, only carrying out the orders of the President via the Department of State, that they were somehow immune and not to be held responsible for their actions. They were excused. Weird. I watched them talk, muttering at each other. She had both hands on his chest, and then she kissed him. Her hair glistened with rain. Then I heard his deep voice, raised for a moment. Those assholes, he said. I turned away, laughing. Did he really think that was what they were? He could see no farther than the men’s locker room, the perfect Bourbon prince. Nothing learned, nothing forgotten. Machno, Machno. I began to laugh again. Where are you now that we need you?

  Verdun was the last of the battlefields, though naturally when you are touring in that part of Europe you cannot avoid them; they are as common as vineyards. But now he only noted the signs; we did not “go in.” We moved easily from War One to War Two, meandering north. We passed within a few miles of Waterloo, but no one said anything. They talked in the front seat, I read or dozed in the rear. I remember one little bit of conversation regarding the great crisis.

  She said, “What are they going to do?”

  The ambassador said, “The time for doing something is past.”

  “Well, they can’t do nothing.”

  He said, “Yes, they can. They let it get to a point where they can only play the cards they have. There won’t be another deal. And it’s a nothing hand.”

  D’accord, Ambassador.

  At last we arrived in Hamburg. You know Hamburg in early December, the Alster frozen and the icy wind from the North Sea. They wanted to meet some friends in Hamburg. There was a fish house they liked in the harbor, so we drove there after checking into the Hotel Prem. You remember the harbor. We ran the gauntlet of whores. God knows what was in their veins, they stood on the cobblestones about twenty meters apart, black tights, red skirts. Quite young, most of them, and good-looking.

  They were meeting embassy people. A German joined us later. Herr Kleust worked in the Foreign Ministry, and they’d known him in Africa. I vaguely remembered him, because I was very young at the time. He was with the ambassador during the incident in Africa. The ambassador always maintained that Herr Kleust saved his life. So when they meet they always throw their arms around each other. Grunts and backslapping, old comrades that they are. The ambassador wipes away a tear while his wife looks at them, shaking her head. They are speaking rapid German. The ambassador calls him my-dear-friend-who-came-in-at-the-end-of-everything. A reference to something in the past, I have no idea what it is.

  There are the three of us, two embassy people, and, later, Kleust. I’m certain that one of the embassy people was the chief spy. I had his name, but who knows if it’s his real one. They’re interchangeable parts, the spies. This one looked about thirty years old, except you knew he was fifty. Smooth complexion, short hair, cleft chin, looked like he stepped out of the window of J. Press, a trust-fund English professor at Yale. Melville and the Lake Poets. He was one of the old boys, the new ones aren’t so smooth. Southern accent, young wife. His German was perfect. They were talking about the great crisis, switching back and forth between English and German, using euphemisms, code words, metaphors, probably to confuse me.

  “We had too many men on the ice,” J. Press said. “There should have been a cut in the squad five, six months ago.”

  “Try three years,” the ambassador said.

  They were drinking a lot of wine and halfway through the entrée the ambassador began to talk about the White House, and how incompetent they were. Assholes, he said; and here I thought he’d meant the Revolutionary Guards. The ambassador is full of surprises. The spy took offense, only President we’ve got, give him our full support, tough decisions, hate to be in his shoes, oh bruthah. That plantation accent. The ambassador changed the subject, and then they were talking about the latest scandal, the one that hadn’t gotten into the newspapers—not yet! Some FSO ran off with counterpart funds and his secretary and was in Brazil, where no one could get at him. They were talking about what a mild-mannered fellow he was, pussy-whipped all those years by his wife, and what a shame, etcetera etcetera. Class alliance. Foreign Service Protective Association.

  Kleust walked in then and he and the ambassador went through their comrades-in-arms act. The German didn’t say much, just sat and listened. He was almost bald, with a heavy, dour face. Herr Kleust displayed little on the surface, except to smile when the ambassador would reach over and punch him on the arm.

  They began to talk about the difference between American and European scandals. Some of the scandals I’d never heard of, but the idea seemed to be that the Europeans were tempted by ideology and sex, the Americans by money. The Americans used to be tempted by ideology but ideology had no meaning for today’s American. Uh-huh. They had a fine time talking about scandal. The great continuum of scandal, scandal through the ages. The spy, half drunk at the end of dinner, put a cigar in his tight little mouth and talked for fifteen minutes, his Yale lecture. How inevitable it all was. Scandal inevitable. War inevitable. Error inevitable. Life in the West. The imperfectability of man. The long twilight str
uggle, sigh. Oh, the spy was saying, we’ve seen it all. Nothing new under the sun for us, loyal civil servants. We’ve been around forever. Got to take the long view, ha-ha. It was a disorderly world, filled with troublemakers.

  “Americans,” I said.

  He looked at me. “What?”

  “Most of the trouble is made by Americans.”

  He looked at the ambassador, eyebrows elevating.

  The ambassador said,“My son has the idea that his countrymen are not letter-perfect.”

  “Let us hear what he has to say.” That was Herr Kleust, speaking in German.

  “Vietnam, I suppose,” J. Press said.

  “Palestine and Iran,” I said.

  He continued as if he hadn’t heard me; he probably hadn’t. He was not the sort of spy who listened. He was too fond of his own theories. For Americans, especially young Americans, Vietnam stood in the way of the horizon. It stood in the way of history. It was a tumbril in Constitution Avenue. But you don’t have to worry about it, he said; it won’t ever happen again. “Americans won’t ever again believe, the way those Americans believed. Two centuries of belief ended in Indochina. Of the people, by the people, and for the people; that all ended, too. Follow me. That ended. I thought a kind of class warfare would begin, but it didn’t. So the belief in justice: that ended, too.”

  “Is that what you think?” Herr Kleust said.

  “Absolutely,” J. Press said.

  “I meant the young man.” The German smiled coldly at me. He had not taken his eyes off me and now he said softly, “The trouble in Palestine and Iran is caused by the Americans?”

  Herr Kleust had no interest in Indochina; he had no more interest than I did, though for different reasons.

  “Can we get off this?” the ambassador said, pulling a long face. He signaled the waiter for another round of schnapps.