by Greg Baxter
The trumpet begins again. The music is faster now and people start dancing. Whatever makes people want to dance makes me want to stand completely still. This is how I appreciate good music. It makes me feel calm. I think Saskia is like this too. Her eyes are calm. She and I are just standing. It’s nice to just stand and listen to music, to a single instrument. In the evenings, at the larger markets, big bands play. They belt out huge polka versions of pop songs, or sentimental old Christmas tunes, and those are a lot of fun too. The crowds stand around contentedly, drinking and listening to the music, and I walk slowly through them, politely making way for anybody crossing my path. The apartment has a terrace, says Saskia, and a big kitchen. I’ll take it, I say. You haven’t even seen it! Doesn’t matter, I say. I think you should see it first. It could be full of mice. I’ll get a cat, I say. It’s expensive, she says. Well, then it probably doesn’t have mice. I thought you said you weren’t in a rush, she says. I have a good feeling, I say. She is weighing the risk of asking me another question, one that is much larger, but she resists. Do you really want to get a coat? she asks eventually. Yes, I say. We return our mugs to the drinks hut and get some money back. There is still dancing in front of the stage. Adults are dancing with their children and grandchildren. There you go, I say. What? she says. Now that’s a picture, I say. Yes, but it’s a pity when Christmas passes, and all we have left is the cold. I don’t know, I say, I think I’d like a long winter. You’ll get one, she says. Don’t worry. We leave the market and the little square in front of the church, and the fountain with the saint of seafarers in it, and we press upward. From time to time, the centre appears above and ahead of us, in the snow and fog and dimness, through spaces between building tops, spires, arches. We are heading for the interior. There is a cathedral there, and a fortress, but from here they are just faint shadows.
Saskia was born in this city. Both her parents are dead – the mother first and the father a few years after. Her father was not from here, and when she was young she moved away. She came back after the death of her father, and I have the impression she came back in order to get a good job. She says there are two kinds of economists: the kind that own jets and the kind that ride bicycles. She doesn’t seem to think of herself as a person who wants a jet, so I presume this makes her an economist on a bicycle. Except that when she is pushed to defend a position, or when she talks about the assumptions her colleagues make about her because she is a woman, for instance that she will eventually want a child more than she will want a promotion, she reveals an ambition to succeed not just because she can but because other people think she cannot, or would not.
Somebody here asked me about my politics. I told him I had none. We were sitting in a bar, and he was drinking, and I was not drinking, not really, just a beer, slowly, and he said I was a liar. His name was Fritz. Everything is political, said Fritz. I said nothing, and Fritz, I suppose, realized I had not agreed with him, so he told me what I really felt was disillusionment with politics, and that’s not the same thing as having no politics. He seemed like a nice guy. We hung out for the rest of the night. He said, I don’t smoke, but all night he smoked my cigarettes, and then we went to an automat so I could buy more cigarettes, and he said, Get me a pack too, so I bought him a pack. He put that pack in his pocket and smoked the cigarettes in my pack. He talked almost entirely about himself, and the city, and about politics. He was comically short and had a very funny walk, like something out of the Ministry of Silly Walks, where every step off his right foot was a bounce, as though he was trying to see over a short fence. He took me on a long walk that ended at the parliament building, and there he shook my hand and said goodbye. Goodbye, I said, and I’ve never seen him since. Fritz. A good name. That was one of my first nights in the city. Or maybe it was recently. As time diffuses, or my preoccupation with it ebbs, I have lost my grip on chronology. I also forget things. I don’t remember anything about my flight from the US; I remember only standing before a huge board in the airport, here, looking at hotel listings. After Fritz said goodbye, he hopped in a taxi. He stood at the edge of a busy road right in front of Parliament, where there were hundreds of taxis on the road, all with illuminated yellow bars of light on their rooftops, coming at us in a constant swarm, and Fritz stuck his hand out and one dropped out of the swarm and stopped right in front of him. Throughout the night, Fritz had been telling me that his party – he was a local councillor in a satellite city – was going to storm a general election in the spring, and wipe out inequality by raising taxes and putting unemployed people back to work, and as I stood before the parliament building that night, with its enormous white columns, I realized he had brought me there in part to show me the trophy he prized but also to suggest the pointlessness of being apolitical. The building is impressive. It’s a wonder. During the day, tourists walk around it like the apes around the obelisk in 2001, and you cannot blame them. That’s the way I felt, staring up at it. But after a while you don’t feel wonder. You start to feel panic, because you realize that human beings are possessed by the idea that they must fill the world with objects and ideas that will outlive them, and you suddenly glimpse the fires that burn below human despair. I think of Fritz fondly, and the fondness comes from an instantaneous nostalgia – the knowledge that I’ll never see him again, not ever, and that he may not even remember meeting me, because every night he goes out drinking he finds somebody to proselytize to, to borrow cigarettes from, and to leave at the feet of the symbol of his hope for a transformed and just world.
Saskia and I have come to the outer ring road. It’s eight lanes wide, four in each direction, plus lanes for buses and streetcars. An underground passage runs below it, and there’s no way to cross it otherwise. There are posters up and down the white-tiled corridors for exhibitions, concerts and films, and advertisements for magazines, perfumes, and tourist destinations. There is also, curiously, at the halfway mark as you cross beneath the street, a chrome panel in the wall that is tallying, in red digitized numbers, the population of the world. It makes a ticking noise. I feel, though I can’t explain why, a desire to watch it – that last digit changes every half-second, the second-last digit flips every five seconds. Saskia doesn’t notice that I’ve stopped until I call after her and she comes back and stops and watches it with me for a while. She gives me a funny look. We stand there for maybe half a minute, and then it’s unreal, the numbers become merely numbers, and I can keep moving.
I had an infection once that made me very sick, and I remember thinking I was going to die, and I didn’t care. An infection? She nods. A rare one. I’d been in South America for a few weeks. I caught it from a bird. I’m glad you lived, I say. Me too, she says. Still, it’s strange. You have terrible thoughts about life and death when you are that sick. I was in hospital for a month. Nobody could figure it out, until a specialist came in and said, Have you been in contact with exotic birds? I don’t remember much from then – that was two or three years ago – but I remember the words exotic birds, because I saw nothing but blue and pink and orange and green feathers. I actually felt myself lying on them, and it was very soft, and I thought I had died. But then I said, Yes. And they all nodded. There was no medicine to take. They just kept me in a bed and watched me, and hoped I would live.
I was once really seasick, in the Sea of Japan, I say. We surfaced in a powerful storm, and I had been ill for a few days anyway, with I don’t know what, and the only thing I remember was needing to get off the boat and drown as soon as possible. She nods sympathetically, then she says, Janos thinks you are in the CIA. The CIA? Like a spy? Not like a spy, she says. He thinks you torture people. Good God, I say. Does he really think that? It would be perfect for him if you were in the CIA, she says. But does he seriously think that? She says, Who knows? We come to the escalator that will take us back to the surface. We stand to the right, and two kids run past us on the left. It took me about forty-eight hours after arriving in the city to realize that there was a system for standi
ng and walking on escalators – stand on the right, walk on the left. That was a pretty confusing forty-eight hours. One guy kicked my ankles, and a lot of people shoved me. Now I feel like I ought to shove and kick tourists who don’t understand the routine, not because I’m angry but because I think systems everybody understands are valuable, and I’d hate to see one collapse. We reach the surface, under a large shelter. It’s not snowing any more, but it feels colder. From here you can see how, to the north, the ring road rises high above the buildings. There are billboards all over the place, and some are digital and flashing. There are high-rise office buildings and hotels along it. Inside the loop, and built into the side of a small mountain, is a stadium. It’s where they play soccer, and whenever there’s a game between two particular teams from opposite sides of the city, the streets fill with speeding armoured trucks and ringing sirens and blue flashing lights, and you see riot police all over the place. I had this explained to me one night. I was in a café and saw a bunch of police cars and a paddy wagon that resembled an APC barrel down the street, with flashing lights and loud sirens. I thought it must be something serious, but nobody around me even looked up. Beyond the stadium and the high-rises, about twenty miles away, is the airport. Over the past few weeks, the weather has shut the airport a few times, so people are taking trains to get outside the city now. I’m not in the CIA, I say to Saskia. She gives me a look that says it’s not at all necessary to state the obvious. But I feel the desire to explain anyway, and say: I was on subs for most of my career, then got out of the Navy and tried to make some money. When that failed I joined the reserves, and as a reservist I went to Iraq. I worked with a team in Baghdad that provided intelligence to troops that were fighting, but my work was mostly done at a desk. Saskia asks me what I mean by intelligence, because, perhaps, the word has brought her thoughts back to the notion of spying and the CIA. Information, I say, just information. Tell me about life on a submarine, she says. What do you mean? I ask. What are the people like? Well, I say, there are two kinds of submarine people – there are the boomer people and there are the fast-attack people. Boomer? asks Saskia. Ballistic missile submarines, I say. Oh, says Saskia. Do I sound different saying words like that? I ask. You do, she says, gleefully. I continue: Generally the guys who appreciate boomer culture are older, or guys with families. The deployment is always ninety days. It’s a steady life. The guys who like fast-attack culture are generally younger, and wouldn’t care if they were deployed for ten years, so long as there was action. Only the best officers with the best records get on nuclear subs, and they’re paid more than anyone else, and they train for longer. And that was you? asks Saskia. That was me, I say. So you’re smart, she says. I was ambitious, I say. And that’s why you have so much money, she says. The money isn’t from the Navy, I say. And I say nothing else. The truth is that all the money I’d saved from my first stint in the Navy was wasted on a failed business. I got hazardous pay for my reserve deployment in Baghdad, and with that money I started another business – an intelligence firm, of which I was the sole employee – that I brought to Baghdad as a civilian. And it’s that business that made me a fortune. What’s it like to be on a submarine? she asks. I pause to consider, gratefully, her sense of diplomacy – letting me off easily about Iraq by asking me about a thing she probably has no real interest in. How do you mean? I ask. Do they rock a lot? Oh, submarines rock quite a bit on the surface, but once you submerge, the rocking subsides the deeper you go. Eventually there is no rocking. It is all very still and quiet. The only time you remember you’re underwater is when the ship angles to make depth changes.
That really is the truth – you forget you are underwater. You have jobs to do. You stay busy, and you stick to a schedule. You are aware of time only because your activities remind you what time it is. You realize that the further you get from the outward and obvious signs that days and nights exist, that is, natural lightness and natural darkness, the more painstakingly you must celebrate the rituals of night and day. If you are eating pancakes in the mess deck, it’s morning. If you’re eating leftovers, it’s midnight. You run drills. You relax when you’re told to relax. You exercise. You have to exercise, or you will experience a strange exhaustion – an exhaustion of mind, in which you can neither think coherently nor sleep. You’re on a six-hour duty watch every day, and for those six hours you are intensely focused on a small space in front of you. The working conditions you face in a sub are completely unique, and almost everybody who is not a submariner would find these conditions deeply unpleasant. But if you can hack it for a little while, it all normalizes. It’s a routine, and you look forward to the breaks you get from time to time, surfacing and looking up. If you are Officer of the Deck and you are in charge at night sometime, and you get to open the bridge access hatches, you might witness something pretty extraordinary – the clear night sky, full of stars, after weeks of being submerged. I was Officer of the Deck once on an Arctic transit. I drove the boat through the North Pole and cycled around it twice. We were there in wintertime, when there were only about four hours of daylight each day. We popped up in that daylight and got on the ice and had a snowball fight. For a reason I can’t explain, it didn’t feel very cold. A lot of the guys were out in T-shirts, shorts and bare feet. They just ran and ran and ran. We had come through quite a few feet of solid ice, which the sub does easily, and we were on top of thousands of feet of empty, cold water. One of the things you hear a lot from young officers is the surprise they feel standing in front of the attack centre, at being so young and being responsible for the launch of ballistic missiles, Tomahawks, and torpedoes. The message you get from senior officers from day one is to never forget that the submarine insignia, the dolphins you wear on the breast of your uniform, is a warfare qualification. You learn basic functions and damage control, but what it is really all about is learning how to employ the sub as a weapon. This is why no thirty-year-old officer ever stands in front of the command launch console and comments on how weird it is that he, just this ordinary nerd who somehow ended up in the Navy, is going to launch a cruise missile.
Saskia opens her mouth but says nothing, then closes it. Say it, I say. She says it’s not a happy story – it’s about her parents. I tell her it would be nice to hear. I don’t believe you, she says. Well, I say, now it will be awkward if you don’t. We continue, and after a considerable pause she says, When we moved away from this city, when I was a girl, we lived in Spain. My father was a civil engineer. We lived in a village full of men who looked like mushrooms. My mother was from here, but my father was from Spain. Leaving here made him happy, but it made her sad. How long did you live there? I ask. Ten years. About ten years. We left when my mother died. I was fifteen. Then we spent three years in Athens, and my father died, then I went to university in Brussels. Then I came here and got a job. Do you still have family here? I ask. Cousins, uncles, she says. It’s tough to lose your parents so young, I say, which is, I think, the same thing I said when she first told me. She says yes but not sadly, just agreeing. My mother’s death caused my father’s death, she says. Her death took a long time. She became tired of toxic medicine – every time the doctors gave her something, they would joke that it would kill a horse, different doctors, always a horse – and she decided to die. My father saw every hour of his life as a series of decisions that led to her death, and became depressed for about a year – our first year in Athens. Then one morning he woke up and shaved his beard and put on a suit. I told him he looked happy. Happy? he said. No, but I’m not sad. Your mother decided to die instead of going on living with us in Spain. I’m not sure when I’ll be back. Then for the next two years he drank and womanized and stole money from his own business, and got very fat. In the end he died because of high cholesterol. Did he give up working? I ask. No, he kept working. He designed sewers. One day I was at home and he had grown very fat and his eyes were turning yellow, and he said, The function of a civil engineer is in all cases to ease the flow of human misery.
We remove barriers to human connectedness and progress. Because of us, man could create cities. He was gentle and optimistic all his life, she says. But he had no courage. She stops and looks behind her, because she has heard the dinging bell of a streetcar at a stop at the bottom of the street. My feet are getting cold, she says. How are yours? My feet are fine, I say, but I don’t mind getting the streetcar. We wait. We watch the streetcar climb toward us. It has one bright light, a Cyclops eye, that points down at the street and makes the wet rails sparkle. Do you want to get some dinner tonight? she asks. Sure, I say, I owe you for today. Not at all. If it weren’t for you, she says, I’d probably be sitting in that café with Janos, complaining about the capitalists.
