The American Ambassador

by Ward Just

  He closed his eyes and the trembling ceased. The painkilling drugs took hold and he fell into a deep sleep. I knew it was a coma, and that it was the end. I remained at his side for a very long time, thinking about his life, and mine, and our life together. And who would he sue, given the chance? I left the room and stood in the dark corridor a minute. A bright light at the end of the corridor announced the nurses’ station. I moved along the wall slowly, the wall supporting my body. I told the nurse that my father would surely die that night and that they were to make certain that when he did, he was comfortable, and without pain. They would see him struggle but there was nothing they could do about that. And I left the hospital and four hours later he was dead.

  “Bill,” Hartnett said.

  “I’m the fellow with the deep pockets,” he said.

  “For Christ’s sake, Bill! Stop it!”

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll stop it.”

  Then Elinor was at their side, carrying three newspapers and a magazine. Bill brightened, seeing her. He made a joke, they finished their drinks, and walked to the gate.

  Hartnett said, “Good luck.”

  Elinor said, “We’re lucky to have a week before we report. We’re going to have a nice relaxed holiday, before Bill gets down to business in Bonn.”

  Hartnett said, “I’ll let you know what’s happening at this end. I’ll have the committee report by next week, the draft version. The one that’ll call for hearings or not. We’re clear for a while, anyway. They won’t do anything for the next few weeks. Have a good holiday. Do you know exactly where you’ll be?”

  “Here and there,” Elinor said.

  Bill smiled and stuck out his hand. They shook hands and embraced. The line began to move. Not very many people bound for Hamburg on a Monday night in November, so he and Elinor would have an easy trip, able to stretch out. Hartnett took her hand and bent to kiss her.

  He said again, “Good luck.”

  She said, “Take care. Thanks for coming down.”

  He said, “Will you let me know?”

  She said, “We’ll call you in a week, Dick.”

  “And I’ll ride herd on the committee.”

  Bill said, “Fuck the committee.”

  Hartnett said, “Telephone me next week.”

  Bill said, “Don’t forget Richard.” He hoped that Hartnett would keep his promise to visit the boy, and stay in touch with his doctors. He knew more about Richard than about his own son, and felt closer to him.

  Hartnett looked at him, having forgotten all about Richard; and then, remembering, he nodded. The lawyer watched them go. Bill had his arm around Elinor’s waist, was whispering something into her ear; she turned and laughed. How extraordinary they were, Hartnett thought; they were perfectly complementary pieces of music. The lawyer moved to go, looking around him, noticing suddenly how shabby JFK had become. The international departure lounge was dirty and poorly lit, without cheer or festivity. He had known it when it was Idlewild, and the most modern airport in the world, always exciting, always filled with a fine edge of anticipation.

  They had a drink and dinner, not talking much, and now she was sleeping. He stared out the plastic window, watching the moon glitter on the surface of the North Atlantic. He had ordered a double Cognac after dinner, trying to chase his depression; no luck. No wonder. He bought earphones and watched the movie a moment, but could not concentrate; it had to do with children and aliens, escapist fantasy, adolescent ceremony. He gave it up and noticed it only on the edges of his vision, an erratic flicker, disconcerting. Flexing the fingers of his left hand, he felt the skin pleasantly stretch, the joints cracking, tingling, alive.

  Surely Hartnett would keep his promise, he was good about those things. He and Richard had become very close. Richard had told him about his girl, what she’d been like, her verve and spirit; they had just begun to think about the future together. His last day in the hospital they had taken Richard’s bandages off and they had looked at each other. Tears filled the boy’s eyes, and he looked away. They were both embarrassed, seeing each other for the first time. They were not what they expected. Richard had said, How do I look? And Bill replied, Fine, and indicated the mirror over the bureau. Richard had looked at his battered face a full minute and at last had nodded, It’s the same face. But I’m not the same person. He’d said to Bill, You’re younger than I thought. Bill smiled, amused; he looked older than his age, always had. That meant his voice sounded older still. And to hell with chronology.

  He had given Richard names and addresses. If he ever needed help—

  Well, thanks, he’d said. But he didn’t think he’d be in Germany any time soon.

  I’ll write, Bill had said.

  I hope everything works out all right, Richard had replied.

  You, too, Bill had said.

  I won’t count on it, the boy said solemnly.

  I won’t either, Bill said.

  Then we won’t be disappointed, either of us, Richard said.

  They shook hands, man to man; and that was that. Except Hartnett had promised to look in on the boy, say hello, see what he needed. And what the boy needed, Hartnett couldn’t provide.

  All right, he thought, sleep. Sleep now. In the morning, they would be in Germany. And was it not true that all modern history begins in Germany?

  He opened his eyes and looked up. The movie was flickering lamely to its damp conclusion, enough consolation to fill a cosmic silver screen, the children reunited with their befuddled parents, the aliens dispersed to other galaxies, the children so wise, goodhearted and foul-mouthed, the aliens so tolerant, a pleasant warm future for Americans to nap to. A happy glow, though to Bill it looked like a penumbra.

  “Bill?” she had been sleeping in the seats across the aisle. She touched his shoulder. “You were talking in your sleep. You were in the zone, Bill.”

  “Sorry.” He had been dreaming, and the dream slipped away; he tried to catch it, having a happy memory of it, but the images were already out of reach. “Did you have a good sleep?”

  She smiled. “Airline sleep is like airline food.” She was leaning over the back of his seat, her hair mussed and her eyes cloudy. He raised his head to look at her, and was struck by a sensation of utter intimacy. The sensation lasted only a moment, like the dream that had slipped away. But it left him breathless, as if his heart had stopped for a moment, leaving him suspended like an aerialist. They looked at each other a full minute, and gradually the sounds around them came into full focus, the hiss of the engines, the lift as the aircraft corrected its course, swinging east over the North Sea. He took her hand delicately, touching the pads of her fingers. Concentrating on her, he felt her reach out to him; and he felt the most unaccountable confidence in himself, in her, and in what they intended to do in Hamburg.

  It was morning, a cold north light.

  He said, “Are you ready for all this?”

  She said, “No.”

  He said, “Neither am I.”

  She said, “I was thinking about the island.”

  “What about it?”

  “Wouldn’t it be great if we were there now, just us two.”

  Bill had sent word ahead that he would appreciate it if his former colleague, Harry Erickson, could meet them at the airport. He hadn’t seen Harry in two years, and wanted to know how things were working out for him in the Federal Republic. When they emerged from customs he was there, his dress and manner identical with the Germans bustling around him. He was reading a German newspaper. Elinor did not recognize him at first, and when he walked up to them she thought he was a German official with unpleasant news of some kind. Then Harry smiled broadly, and she laughed. He had always seemed so tense and ill at ease in Africa, so sour and pessimistic. They went to a café for coffee, to unwind from the long journey. Bill told him they were in Hamburg for a holiday, recuperation for him, a chance to allow themselves to become reacquainted with the BRD. Harry seemed to accept that. Was there anyone he wanted t
o see? No one special, Bill said, it was just a private holiday. Harry was at pains to tell them how well Alice was doing, in this northern climate. The baby was now nearly a year old, a fat, happy baby, named Harry Jr. He and Alice loved Hamburg, so chilly and dry, so civilized, so commercial, so—so no-nonsense.

  On Tuesday he and Elinor went to the exhibit at the Kunsthalle. The great rooms were nearly empty. The tourist season, such as it was, was long gone. Hamburgers were busy in their offices and factories. The artist on exhibit was a young Berliner, a sensation. She was not yet twenty, and she painted on a grand scale; none of the canvases was less than fifteen feet wide. Elinor stepped close up, then moved back, careful to be convincing in her role as tourist and art connoisseur. It was logical that Bill would be bored, always looking around, as if seeking a means of escape.

  The Berliner worked with pen and ink, an excellent draftsman, though her figures were grotesque in the German manner. They were pictures of animals, but the animals—an ox, a crocodile, an elephant, a wolf, a bear—were not flesh and blood. She had drawn them as if they were made of building materials, steel girders, concrete, glass. Close up, they looked like structures, animals assembled by a modern architect, not ominous or threatening, but not benign either. In black and white they presented the sterile face of a German skyscraper, Bauhaus and then some.

  “She has wonderful technique,” Elinor said.

  Bill was noncommittal.

  “I’m not so sure about the subjects,” Elinor said.

  Bill was standing a little behind her, looking casually around. They were alone except for a guard and a well-dressed middle-aged man with a cane. They were standing on the spacious staircase leading to the second floor. The young Berliner’s works were displayed on the high stone walls.

  She stood quietly; the museum seemed enveloped in a kind of hush. “They’re very public, these pictures,” she said, looking at them with her head cocked, her forefinger laid aside her nose. Her words echoed in the chill. “You wouldn’t want them in the living room, or anywhere in your house. They belong in public places. Interesting impulse, to want to paint for a public place.”

  The animals had the look of public buildings, city halls, central banks, embassies, or police headquarters. The animals were transparent, the viewer could see brains, entrails, hearts. The various body parts looked like rooms, here an office, there a conference room or corridor; the tail of the immense crocodile seemed a series of cells with bars on the windows. There were no prisoners, however,

  “ ‘Witty and unique,’ ” Bill read from the program. There was a picture of the artist, a buxom young woman with short black hair and one eyebrow. “These strike you as witty, El?”

  “In a way,” she said. “In a way, they do. They’re beguiling, thrilling in a way.”

  “ ‘They demonstrate the Berliner’s natural sense of isolation,’ ” he said, translating from the German. This was apparently the artist’s estimation of her work. “ ‘West Berlin is a cage inside a cage.’ ” Not bad, he thought. In such an environment, even the animals became mechanical.

  She said, “What do you think?”

  “I’d rather read an essay on the subject.”

  She looked at him, amused, shaking her head. “Philistine.” They were moving slowly up the stone steps, to the second floor.

  He said, “No, I sort of like them. I like the boar.” The boar was constructed with steel girders, as if the artist had drawn an assemblage from a child’s erector set. The boar had a metallic face, vaguely reminiscent of a German politician—Brandt, perhaps, or Helmut Schmidt. It was hard to tell who it was, the face also bore a resemblance to the famous jowly bust of Johann Sebastian Bach. He thought it was Brandt, but the program gave no clue.

  “It’s fresh,” Elinor said.

  “Cheeky,” he agreed.

  “No, fresh as in new.”

  “That, also,” he said.

  She said, “Go along, I’ll be a minute. I want to look at these some more. See what she’s up to really, the girl in the cage.” Elinor often preferred looking at paintings alone. He ascended the stairs, glancing casually around him. The middle-aged man with the cane had walked past them, on his way to the second-floor galleries. He had paid them scant attention, but had paused to peer at a Degas at the top of the stairs, and then had strolled on, his cane going tap-tap-tap. He had the erect bearing of a retired military officer, perhaps on his way to meet a friend for lunch; he moved around the museum as if he owned it.

  The Degas was a portrait of a young dancer, and Bill looked at it, and down the staircase to the mechanical animals. No connection that he could see, though there had to be one somewhere. There was a connection between the Congress of Vienna and SALT II, so there must be a connection between the young Berliner and her animals and Degas’s young dancer. No painter could fail to be influenced by Degas, as no treaty was without its shadow of Vienna; every son had a father. He looked over the railing. Elinor was still below, moving forward and back in front of the crocodile, frowning; she was examining the work, one painter to another.

  He watched her a moment, then followed the taps.

  The middle-aged man was standing in front of one of Max Liebermann’s self-portraits. There were three of them on one ornate wall: stern, sterner, sternest. Liebermann did himself in black and white; he was his own best subject. He was his own young dancer. The middle-aged man tapped his cane impatiently, and marched on to the next room. This was the introduction to Hitler’s degenerates, Nolde, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kirchner, Dix. Max Beckmann had a room all to himself. The middle-aged man seemed happier among the degenerates. He stood very still, a slight smile on his face, as if he were posing.

  A sudden squeak caused Bill to turn. A line of schoolchildren entered the gallery, quiet as prisoners. They looked neither to the left nor to the right but continued through the gallery single file, turning into the hall containing the Flemish. Sneakers squeaked on the marble floors; the sound put his teeth on edge. Two male teachers, one at the head of the column, and the other at its rear, supervised the children. No doubt the children would be happier with Dutch burghers, pastoral scenes of canals, cattle, and tavern life. He felt a moment of vertigo in the large room with its creamy light.

  The unnerving line of quiet children disappeared, and he and the middle-aged man were alone with the degenerates. Except he had slipped away, and was seated on the viewers’ bench in the adjoining gallery, Beckmann’s.

  The moment of vertigo passed. He gave another look at the three Liebermanns, then stepped across the threshold. They were alone in the Beckmann room.

  The middle-aged man said, “During the war, he went to Holland. And then to America.”

  He nodded politely. “Is that right?”

  “In America, there were patrons and he was able to paint again.” All this in slow, cultivated German. “In Holland he was able to do nothing, merely a few oils. But in America he regained himself. Yet his greatest period was before the war.”

  “A great artist,” Bill said.

  “I did not like the ones downstairs,” the middle-aged man said. “They’re trash.”

  “Political art,” Bill said.

  “All great art is political, but that was trash.”

  “I wouldn’t say that Degas was political.”

  “Oh, yes,” he said. He was staring at the Beckmanns on the wall fifteen feet away, and when he spoke it was to them. “I am afraid so. I am afraid that Degas is revolutionary.”

  Bill smiled. “The dancer has a bomb in her tutu.”

  “No,” he said gravely. “It is not the dancer. The dancer has nothing to do with it. It is Degas. It is what Degas does with the dancer, how he has chosen to present her. She is his creation. The dancer is just a dancer, nothing more. Look at the lift of the chin.”

  It was not always successful to joke with a German, but this German was particularly solemn. Bill said, “Not the dancer, but the dance.”

  The middle-aged man nodded de
cisively. “To be sure.” They were looking at one of Beckmann’s triptychs, three stations of the cross; in the background was a daffy-looking snake. He gestured at the wall, sighing. “These are tormented. From his late, tormented period. Poor Max.”

  Bill looked at him, startled. “You knew him?”

  “Slightly,” he said.

  “Here or in America?” He knew the other was lying. Beckmann died in 1950, and this man was about Bill’s own age.

  “In Berlin,” the man said. He looked at his wristwatch and stood, moving his shoulders, straightening, shooting his cuffs.

  Beckmann had left Berlin for good in 1937. “You must have been very young,” he said.

  “I used to see him in the zoo.”

  Bill turned, seeing Elinor; he made a little warning gesture with his hand. But when he turned back, the middle-aged man was gone. He listened for the tapping of the cane, but heard nothing. His vertigo returned, and he sat down heavily on the bench. Beckmann’s Gypsy woman, with her heavy thighs and bright yellow shift, seemed to revolve in front of him. She was staring into a hand mirror, arranging her hair. Elinor said, “Are you all right? You’re sweating.”

  He said, “Spooked.”

  “Max Beckmann has a bad effect on you.”

  “It wasn’t Beckmann.”

  “Who, then?”

  “Where did he go?”

  “The gent? Who was he?”

  Bill looked at her and said in English, “I think he was one of Bill Jr.’s—people. Making contact.” She stared back at him but he said nothing more, for the obedient schoolchildren had returned, marching single file through the gallery. They were passing through the German Expressionists to view another period; their teacher was lecturing on the Quattrocento. The children were utterly silent, except for the squeak of their sneakers. Their discipline worried him. They were like little soldiers on parade. He rose heavily and took Elinor’s hand, and they started back the way they had come. He paused in front of the Degas, looking over the balcony at the mechanical animals. The great staircase was empty. He said, “Darling, we’re going to Berlin. That’s where he is.”