by Chris Petit
THE
HUMAN
POOL
Also by Chris Petit
The Psalm Killer
Back from the Dead
1230 Avenue of the Americas
New York, NY 10020
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2002 by Chris Petit
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Atria Books, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020
Library of Congress Control Number: 2002104390
ISBN-13: 978-0-7434-3641-0
ISBN-10: 0-7434-3641-5
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For Emma
THE
HUMAN
POOL
Vaughan
TWENTY-NINE PALMS, CALIFORNIA, THE PRESENT
HERE’S THE PROBLEM. I wrote this book once the way I was told to, as fiction, to a formula: sex by page such-and-such, with guns to follow. ‘Tell it like it was,’ my then editors urged. ‘Make the reader stand next to you.’ The thing is, nobody else’s description, or the movies, prepare you for what it’s like when it happens to you, and as for the one-liner that sold the story—My Trip to Genocide Hell—it belittles the facts and leaves me feeling ashamed. What they wanted was unimportant compared to the near invisible details which do the real damage.
The first time, I wrote it in the third person, cutting out the history and the shuttling between different characters. Unfortunately, it meant losing most of Hoover’s diary. Being both old and a messy organiser, Hoover was regarded as an embarrassment and worth no more than a cameo as a Deep Throat. Hoover sprawls: old man’s time. What they really objected to was that he is too cussed and remembers too much. He understands that life lacks narrative organisation, that it feels like something other than a story.
For my part, most of the time I felt as though I was in a rush of drowning. Also I have never read anything in fiction so chilling, or inadequate, as a transcript of a real torture interrogation, for its simultaneous ability and failure to convey what was going on. By what mental process does someone decide to write: Subject screams. Statement incomprehensible?
History misleads us, I have discovered, thanks to Hoover. We are taught that it is about things ending and beginning, that it is sequential, a progression of dates down the years, when in reality it is all about connections. The stuff that really scared me didn’t even make it as footnotes in the version they wanted me to write—like what was the real purpose of the sale of a large consignment of wooden huts by a construction company in neutral Switzerland to the Waffen SS in 1942? Or look at the word ‘neutral’: during the Second World War German goods trains were allowed to pass through Switzerland only so long as the contents were not armaments, which, of course, cattle trucks crammed with Italy’s Jews were not.
Which leaves the patient stitching together of multiple details: for example, how the death of an enemy agent in Lisbon in 1942 indirectly connects to the disappearance of a container-load of illegal immigrants sixty years later. I am reminded of the beginning of the old Robert Redford picture Three Days of the Condor, which asks why a book that hasn’t sold in its original market should be translated into half a dozen Middle Eastern languages. After which Redord goes to fetch breakfast and returns to find everyone in the office shot dead.
I also find myself thinking of that game about the film star Kevin Bacon and how many moves it takes to connect him to any other actor or actress in the history of Hollywood. It is frightening how few, (frightening because of the viral shadow that hangs over the game), frightening too when applied to other areas. How many moves from George W. Bush to Osama Bin Laden? One. Bin Laden’s brother Salem was a partner in George W’s oil firm which went belly-up. A wise American poet whom I met once, Ed Dorn, dead now, always maintained that the Gulf War was a Bush family affair about offshore oil leases; when it comes to politics always look for the vested interest. Also of relevance to the several secret histories which follow is Dorn’s remark: ‘Listen. Just because the record isn’t there doesn’t mean it’s lost.’
How many moves from face cream to ethnic cleansing? One, as it turns out, thanks to the pharmaceutical industry.
As it is Hoover’s story, I will begin with him. Without him I wouldn’t be here, so I owe him a formal thanks for that, as well as for permission to use his files, which form the spine of what follows. Further assistance was provided by documents previously belonging to Hoover’s former associate—Obersturmbahnführer Karl-Heinz Strasse of the SS—and papers generously provided by Beate von Heimendorf. ‘Begin’ is not a straightforward word in Hoover’s book. For him, past and present coexist: ‘They bleed into each other, nephew.’ Calling me ‘nephew’ was his condescending way of being affectionate. Or perhaps he meant something more calculated. I wonder if by giving me his files he intended an act of classic transference. Having wrestled with them for so long—as I sit here in the high desert, holed up in the Harmony Motel—I find my own writing starting to impersonate his.
Hoover told me that May 1945 was his obvious starting point, because it was then that he first realised how much was (and remains) invisible. But you can cut the pack anywhere—1942, 1945, 1999, this year, next year—it all links up in the end, not necessarily in the order that it happened. And thanks to the factor known as human error, there may be no closure, ever, maybe no resolution either. Just another cut of the pack, with death the only solution.
Hoover
WASHINGTON
IT IS HARD TO RECALL exactly how the end of the war had been, or what I felt in May of 1945, now nearly a lifetime ago. The justification of our cause was plain for all to see: in our equipment, in our rations, and in our sense of being a young country whose time was still ahead. We had no history to appeal to and, given the mess the Nazis had made of their Thousand Year Reich, most Americans were content with surface, and the idea of being able to lead lives unburdened by other people’s yesterdays.
Many of our troops arrived late enough in Europe to see only the exhaustion of defeat, and to take advantage of fraternisation and the barter of our superior rations. Everyone wanted what our soldiers had. Their lives had a shine to them, or so it had seemed. They were only there to finish a job before going home to America’s better lives, bigger skies, and more energetic, plain-speaking ways. That we might have been naive did not occur to us (in the face of so much exhausted irony). To most of us, anyway.
Now I am a first-generation American. In those days I was still in the process of becoming one. Part of me remains untouched by, and resists, this assimilation. In speech I retain some of my native accent. Not that I keep any other connection to my country of origin, which I left in 1940, with the desire never to return. In fact, that is not entirely true, and I must be careful to get this right. All my life has been bounded by a homesickness, and the paradox that I never made an effort to go back. Perhaps there was no home: Liège lies in my memory beyond a dream.
A night or two ago on a satellite channel, a German film director talked about being a small boy in 1945 watching the first American troops arrive in his village, and how he cried in fright at the strange and novel sight of a black GI eating a banana. I offer this story for two reasons. Because of the odd, roundabout way coincidence works, it is possible I was a witness to this scene, though this was a common fright for German children t
hat spring. There were a lot of black men and enough bananas. The story also demonstrates that tensions among ourselves—the flaws in our own argument—were ignored. We were liberators. Our policies were not under scrutiny.
On matters of coincidence: the older I get, the more I discover unexpected connections. I have led a busy life, full of people and unusual conjunctions, so I should not be surprised, yet I am. This might be a fretful mind looking for meaning where there is none or censoring everything except what it registers as having an obscure significance. I am equally surprised by how often I see people I know on television and read in the papers of their deaths, the count getting closer. I am even starting to see the dead. I glimpsed Willi Schmidt on a TV news item, and he has been dead getting on sixty years. For a moment I was sure. The incident unsettled me. My war memories cut out Willi Schmidt. That’s what I mean about it being hard to recall how the end of the war had been. They were not straightforward times.
That May and June of 1945, Germany was a bewitched countryside, whole swathes untouched by war, picture-book villages with their half-timbered houses and blossoms, in which, of course, not a single Nazi could be found, not even the schoolteacher, with his upper lip pale from a shaved-off Hitler moustache. He and the rest claimed they had been awaiting liberation. All the paraphernalia of the Third Reich—swastikas, Nazi street names, pictures of the Führer—had miraculously vanished, taken down in the night, like the decorations from some festive season cut short, leaving everywhere looking strangely denuded. Like the local teacher’s shaven lip. After a dozen years of hierarchy, and all the propaganda, and what my daughter Naomi with her college education would call ‘iconography’, there was nothing.
Though the larger fear had vanished, our unease persisted. Behind the open friendliness of the normal greeting between soldiers who didn’t know each other—‘Hey, buddy, how ya doin?’—lay a real anxiety. Stay-behind units of crack Nazi troops, of wolflike savagery, were rumoured to be disguised as American soldiers and hiding in woods, ready to start a rear-guard action. Germany was still a haunted and untamed landscape, in which the improvised informality of American signs—‘Bring in your jeep, we never sleep’—took on the appearance of hastily assembled superstitious relics. There was the realisation, too, that what had been fought had been more than just a war. ‘Hey, Grabowski, those dirty Kraut bastards murdered a million Yids, what do you think of that?’ I remember what Grabowski answered. ‘Yeah, ain’t that a pisser,’ he said, as he whittled a piece of wood, sitting by the roadside, with the resigned air of a man who had just realised that no one would ever learn, least of all the victor.
I subscribed to the euphoria and simplicity of victory despite my own war which had been clandestine, grubby, and morally compromised: having done nothing to stop the screams of the tortured; having dined with ‘dirty Kraut bastards’ who had negotiated the deaths of millions. But I believed I had acted out of necessity, for a greater good, for security and stability. Now I suspect the joke was on me.
Since Mary died last November, I find myself thinking more about the time before her, since the raw scar of her absence is too painful. I feel blurred now she is gone. Florida, where we had lived and being a place where people go to die, is not conducive to mourning. I am not close to the children, and am reluctant to be parcelled out for them all to take turns to put me up (and put up with me). The grief I felt was very different from the one the children projected onto me. I no longer wanted or needed company. It was enough to get through the day that I had my conversations with Mary—sometimes aloud, sometimes in my head. The void left by her is more attractive than the life on offer without her. In these long, drawn-out days—time’s equivalent to dull tundra—I find myself eager to settle accounts. Secrets need airing in the end.
Like many men who have led dubious lives, I was sentimental about my marriage, and despite my lapses, told myself I should try to keep things straight in affairs of the heart. Another joke at my expense: Mary’s journals reveal that my marriage was more complicated than she had led me to believe.
The weeks after my wife died were full of watery November afternoons spent walking on an empty beach, entertaining thoughts of getting a dog, stalled by the morbid fear that the dog would one day find me dead. I could imagine the children worrying about me among themselves. I held out until falling and spraining my wrist, which resulted in strapping. Yes, I had been drinking. I had always been extra careful to give the glass table a wide berth—being mindful of how the actor William Holden had died, gashing his head in a fall and bleeding to death—but tripped over the chair leg. On the subject of actors, I have been told by my children that I look like a dead TV actor, Richard Boone.
Foolishly, I mentioned the sprain to Naomi on the phone. There followed immediate summonses from all the children. It took until Christmas to winkle me out of our home in Englewood, with invitations issued in the names of the grandchildren—Tom and Mickey, Dwight, Hannah, Mo (for Monica) and Joe Junior—the unspoken implication being that I wasn’t going to be around much longer to enjoy their company.
My PowerBook has become my lifeline. It lets me spend the mornings alone, writing or pretending to write. The family makes joking references to my memoirs, even though they have no idea what I did beyond something boring for the government. I have never discussed the real nature of my work, except once with Naomi, late one night when we had a bottle of red wine to finish. But Naomi simply shrugged: so what? So much for unburdening. Most children, I have noticed, remain incurious about their parents. Josh, my eldest—Mary had a penchant for biblical names; there’s David as well—jokes that my mornings consist of endlessly typing the same sentence: ‘All work and no play makes Dad a dull boy.’
Josh lives in Iowa, of all places. I managed three weeks there before pleading that it was too cold, and moved down to David in Phoenix. David’s wife is an insistent overpleaser, and within days I was plotting my escape. The stay lasted a month before I could extricate myself without appearing ungrateful.
The point of coming to Naomi was that I was supposed to look up old Washington contacts; except what do you say?
Naomi has always been my favourite, perhaps because of her late, unplanned conception and a wilfulness shown as a child, a propensity for disobedience, long since lost. I’d had hopes for Naomi, and I still like her the best, but she married a dope, and her children are spoiled. Her even good cheer and politeness are very different from how I remember, and both act as distancing devices; I wonder if she isn’t on Prozac. In the evident unspoken dissatisfaction of her life I see my own parenting mistakes. Our failure to talk, even when one of us makes the effort, is sad.
Naomi has a shed in the garden with an oil heater, where I work. The grass is lustreless and muddy after a late snowfall. My arrival in Washington had been greeted by raw February winds and one or two early spring flowers that were trying to push their way up: the high-suicide weeks, the ones that did for Sylvia Plath. The shed heater was efficient enough, but Naomi, on finding me at the desk wrapped in a blanket, always tried to persuade me to work in the house, where there is no room. The truth is, I have nothing to do, except brood, and wait. So I write.*
A couple of weeks ago, a TV programme about life changes invited the viewer to write an obituary as a form of self-assessment. I had snorted at the time, and argued with Naomi, who is increasingly susceptible to the panaceas of experts; yet I see that my log-on file for the next day contained the paltry offering:
Born Liège 1919. Army conscript, 1939. Nazi invasion, 1940. Captured. Escaped on bicycle, dressed as paysan, travelled through France, uneventfully, until chance meeting with Belgian fascist. His stolen papers used for passage from Brittany to French West Africa. There involved in an historical footnote following the Dakar Raid (Sept 1940), interpreting for German agents organising the retrieval of Belgian gold reserves, forwarded after the fall of Belgium and France.
I have just realised. This gold, in all likelihood, I saw again, five yea
rs later in Frankfurt, with Allen Dulles. I also note that I omitted to mention that I’d had to kill the Belgian fascist for his papers.
For a long time now I haven’t known where to begin. At the beginning? That boy, born Joseph van Hover in Liège in 1919, who exists now only in a solitary black-and-white photograph showing a lad in suspenders and short trousers, with a defiant gaze and a pudding-basin haircut, seems irrelevant to this. The children had the photograph enlarged recently and treated by computer to remove the creases and faults of age and fading development. In its newly smooth state the boy who was me has taken on a strangely ironed-out and lifeless appearance. At what point did Joseph van Hover turn into Joe Hoover? Perhaps that is my beginning.
As it is most days are spent avoiding the issue. It is as though—as though is a frequent and annoying phrase of mine, but in its combination of suspension and correlation (and wishful thinking) it is an accurate enough summary of my life—as if I could enter my past through the back door and, by coming at it from an unexpected angle, find the moment which illuminates everything before and after.
Kafka wrote that there are many places of refuge, only one of salvation. But the opportunities for salvation are as many as the places of refuge. I understand what he means, I think. Each line I take back into my own life leads to a dead end. Connections I expect to be made don’t happen.
Bad days are spent writing Mary painful letters she will never read, saying everything I should have said when she was alive. I took to writing her as a way of confronting my failures as a husband and a father, and those of my children. The letters were brutal in their assessments and I wasn’t sure why I was doing it.* The worst days are wasted playing Eric’s Solitaire on the computer.
