American Romantic

by Ward Just

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Prelude

  PART I

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  PART II

  Seven

  PART III

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2014 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.

  American romantic / Ward Just.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-544-19637-7

  I. Title.

  PS3560.U75A86 2014

  813'.54—dc23

  eISBN 978-0-544-22764-4

  v1.0414

  To Sarah

  Prelude

  THESE events happened a while back, when the war was not quite a war, more a prelude to a war. Their army was called a guerrilla force. Our army was called a Military Assistance Command. The war is the least of the story that follows. It cast its own shadow, and to live within it was to live within a sphere of strained silence and self-reliance.

  Foreign service officer Harry Sanders was visiting river villages in one of the southern provinces. He traveled by boat with a helmsman and a bodyguard, a lethargic army sergeant who sat in the stern, a carbine in his lap, his eyes invisible behind army-issue sunglasses. Foliage along the edges of the river was thick and, where the channel narrowed, so close that the leaves touched the boat’s hull. The helmsman throttled back, explaining that he was disoriented by the river water, dead still and reflective as a mirror. Stare at it long enough and it was hard to tell up from down.

  The Americans were there to inspect projects in five villages, a schoolhouse in one, wells in two others, a guardhouse in the fourth, a clinic in the fifth. The clinic was Harry’s particular interest, certainly the most troubling, completed only the week before. Construction delays were chronic. The idea was to verify that the work had been done and that the projects were fully operational and useful to the inhabitants. There were always complaints and Harry was there to listen to the complaints—the leaking roofs, the lack of proper medicines, the strange noise the well made. In each village the headman would take Harry to the project, whatever it was, and explain the difficulty, and Harry wrote the complaints in a notebook and promised action, though not right away. The sergeant always stood a little apart, holding his carbine while he scrutinized the surroundings. The first three villages were empty of people, always a bad sign. Asked about that, the headman would say the people were in the fields, harvesting. But they were nowhere in sight. The villages were the soul of silence. Nothing moved in the damp heat. Even the insects had disappeared. Asked about the security situation, the headman smiled vaguely and said there had been no change. The villages were exposed. Why, only the other day a platoon of the enemy had arrived at dusk and harangued them for an hour or more. There were threats. Finally they took what they wanted and departed. What did they want? They wanted food and volunteers and went away with the food and three teenage boys. The headman was small of stature, middle-aged, with a wispy beard that fell to his chest. His eyes were hooded and he never looked directly at Harry.

  We should go now, the sergeant said.

  What do you see?

  Nothing. That’s the trouble.

  Harry thanked the headman and gave him some money and he and the sergeant walked slowly down the path to the boat. When Harry looked back, the headman had vanished. He wondered how they did it, disappear into thin air like Ali Baba. He thought that somehow they dwelled in a parallel universe, one of their own making. The American presence covered them the way a shroud covered a grave. No hint of the shape of things beneath the shroud. The shroud was opaque. Anything could be under it, a corpse or a bomb or a pygmy elephant or a naked woman. And if the shroud were suddenly ripped away—well, perhaps one would find nothing at all. Harry supposed that someday a native of the region would write a poem describing the parallel universe, its weather and dimensions, its values, what it loved and what it loathed, its aspirations. Why were foreigners hated so? Not only Americans but everyone else. And the poem would be translated into an English filled with obscure allusions, dry as dust but something seething beneath the surface.

  They motored on to Village Number Four, mostly unoccupied, though the word that came to mind was abandoned. The guardhouse looked unoccupied. The headman stood impassively to greet him, two small children hanging on his legs. Harry took the presence of the children as a hopeful sign. They were the only hopeful sign, and as he looked about him at the stilted houses and the gray concrete guardhouse he thought that a splash of color would improve the look of things. He often summoned optimistic images when in the sullen countryside and what he conjured now was a newspaper kiosk, the sort of cheerful amenity found on Paris boulevards. Perhaps a café with red awnings and a white-aproned waiter balancing a drinks tray on the tips of his fingers. Somewhere nearby music floated from an open window, French cabaret, horns and violins and Piaf’s raw throat. Girls in short skirts, a boulevardier walking his dog . . . The mirage was unsuccessful. Perhaps next time, something more durable, the Hoover Dam or a Mayan pyramid. Stonehenge. Harry shook hands with the headman, who avoided looking him in the eye. They stood a moment talking of the security situation, the weather, his family. The weather was normal, the security situation in flux, his wife was ill. Harry said, Your village appears deserted. Where is everyone? The headman moved his arms as if to indicate they were elsewhere, in the fields, round and about, parts unknown.

  Harry nodded as if he sympathized. He always wondered how the villagers got on from day to day. He had difficulty imagining ordinary life in this settlement that looked so sour and bereft and fantastic at the same time—as if somewhere in the knotted jungle was a great golden temple with flourishing gardens and still ponds. The stilted houses seemed to float unmoored above the earth. There were just six houses and the guardhouse. Of course these were observations from Western eyes, fundamentally doubtful. Certainly life in this village was as dense as life anywhere, subtle rules and ordinances, unusual understandings, civic mysteries, all of it crowded by the ghosts of ancestors. It was said that native people wanted what everyone everywhere wanted, a roof over their heads, three meals a day, a doctor’s care when they were sick, a more prosperous life generally; the rule of law would come in there somewhere. Surely all this was true but there was much more besides, a way of life that was in some measure unique, a life that honored the past and spoke to the spirit. In any case, in this village intruders were tolerated but not welcome. There had been many intruders over the centuries and what they had brought was grief. Harry and the headman walked to the guardhouse, the headman silent. He had exhausted his English and so they stood mute before the building. This was yet another difficulty. The language was complex and not easily mastered, a tongue of indirection and metaphor, untimely laughter as punctuation. Perhaps that was how remote societies protected themselves, presenting a masked face to the world, a face so blank that anything could be read into it.

  Guardhouse roof leaks, the headman said.

  Ah, Harry said.

  Three leaks.

  Three?

  I have put pots on the floor.

  For the leaks?

  Yes, for the leaks.

  Harry looked
in and saw the pots in the corner, and where the washstand was meant to be there was a television set, its antenna coiled uselessly beside it.

  I’ll see to the leaks, Harry said. No prisoners, I see.

  We are a peaceable village, the headman said.

  All this time, Sergeant Orono had been looking at his watch while he snapped gum. Harry smiled at the headman and the headman smiled back.

  They returned to the boat and continued downriver to the fifth village, the one with the clinic that lacked medicine and a competent doctor. The river meandered, its slow current weary in the afternoon heat. The river widened and the sergeant seemed to relax. Then he lit a cigarette, all the while staring into the vegetation, reeds and light green bushes. He stared now to port, now to starboard, watching for movement, but there was no movement nor any breath of air. No birds. The helmsman suddenly throttled back. He nudged Harry, took a deep breath, and pointed at his nose. The air was different. Decaying vegetation and the silty smell of water yielded to something else.

  Smoke, Sergeant Orono said.

  Ahead, the helmsman said.

  Our village, the sergeant said. This is not good news. We should abort.

  Full ahead, Harry said to the helmsman.

  The goddamn village is burning, the sergeant said.

  We will keep on, Harry said.

  You are not armed, the sergeant said.

  Nevertheless, Harry said, I have orders.

  Smell it now, the helmsman said. I think the sergeant’s right.

  I’ve been here before, Harry said. It’s an ordinary village. No better, no worse than the last one.

  So have I, said the sergeant. I’ve taken fire from this village. It’s a shit village, enemy village.

  Slow ahead, Harry said.

  The helmsman decreased speed a fraction, steering the boat to midriver. The surface was glassy and the reflections of the trees made it difficult to tell up from down. A Janus-faced river, Harry thought. But the river was safer than inland, where line of sight was nil. Smoke was visible now, rising in a gray cloud and dispersing. Harry tried to remember the name of the village but could not. He always thought of it as Village Number Five, the last on the list. He had the name in his notebook but had no wish to consult the notebook now. Dead slow, Harry told the helmsman, and the boat commenced to drift, carried by the invisible current. The channel narrowed again and when they swung around a lazy bend they saw two small boats disappear downriver, away from the village. The settlement came slowly into view. The houses were built on stilts owing to storms during the rainy season, the river filling and overflowing its banks. The sky above the clearing opened up, pale blue that seemed to go on forever. In the sky nothing moved. What a terrible place to live, Harry thought, and then remembered his last visit and his admiration for the simple construction of the houses, so austere in the clearing. They looked as if they had been occupied for a hundred years. Maybe more. Maybe since the coming of Christ, village life unchanged for two millennia. Births, life, death.

  The helmsman settled the boat to the dock and waited. Smoke rose from a building at the far edge of the village. The clinic. The building looked destroyed within. Harry remembered the clinic’s file, a dozen inch-thick folders describing the community and its importance to the region. That was guesswork. The village had some religious significance, but no one knew precisely the nature of the significance; it was said that a holy man had lived there in the previous century, an ascetic admired for his literary works. The village surely deserved a proper clinic. Three years of deliberation before authorization, the Parthenon itself probably received less scrutiny. The file was a masterwork of the bureaucratic art, due diligence run amok, the dimensions of the clinic and exactly where it was to be located. The materials. The shape of the windows and the door. Its height. Its cost. And who would build it? The army offered support but the army had its own procedures and methods. No one thought to consult the villagers, who had scant knowledge of the methods and procedures. Due diligence was not in their repertoire, and certainly the province chief was on board; he himself would see to the materials. And when the clinic was completed at last, it became the centerpiece of a congratulatory hearing before a subcommittee of the United States House of Representatives, lavish praise from the chairman. The ambassador himself journeyed to the village for a look-around and a meeting with notables of the province. Of course all this was before the money spigot was in full flow, millions following millions, more than enough to buy the train to haul the coals to Newcastle, procedures and methods be damned. But now the clinic was finished, erased by the arsonist’s match.

  Harry stepped off the boat and secured the line, Sergeant Orono behind him, his carbine at port arms. The helmsman said he would remain with the boat and then thought better of the idea, and the three of them advanced in the silence of the afternoon, passing one vacant house after another. The smell of smoke grew sharper, acrid, sour to the taste. In the windless afternoon nothing moved. He could have been looking at a vast canvas in a gallery, an oil in nine shades of blue, no focus to it, blurred at the edges. There was no sign of life but Harry believed he was being watched.

  We’ve seen enough, the sergeant said. The helmsman nodded agreement.

  Go back to the boat, Harry said. I want to look at the clinic close-up. I’ll join you in five minutes.

  Harry walked on alone. The dirt surround was immaculate, free of litter, not so much as a gum wrapper or cigarette stub. This was not normal. When he reached the clinic he called out but received no answer. He waited a moment, then stepped back when a figure appeared at the door. The light was failing but he recognized the village headman, a cloth bundle in his arms. He was filthy and the bundle was filthy. The headman stared straight ahead and if he noticed Harry he gave no sign. He moved his head and the cloth fell away to reveal a young girl. She was emaciated, skin drawn tight over her face and limbs. She was rigid in the headman’s arms, her mouth agape. Harry asked if he could help but the headman said nothing. Perhaps he hadn’t heard. He seemed to be in another realm altogether, a place of unassailable privacy. Harry took another step back, understanding now that he was not looking at a young girl but a middle-aged woman. The headman carried her as if she were light as a doll. He swayed, appearing to lose his footing, and suddenly sat on the top step of the clinic’s verandah. And still he did not speak. The woman moved her fingers, searching for something. Her eyes were large and black as a doll’s, without expression. She was surely near death. Harry was reminded of photographs of Nazi death camps and also of photographs from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, not at the time of the explosions but many months later, burned and radiated survivors cared for by their families or left to die alone. A shortage of beds. Never enough morphine. A photograph always put the viewer at a remove, present but not present. A photograph was only a piece of film paper, the result of a shutter’s click from an invisible hand, though the most poignant did remain in the memory of anyone who saw it. Harry took another step back. He had no business there, yet he was drawn to the woman as if she were somehow kin. But they were not kin. They were mysteries to each other and he was an intruder, a minor official of the American government unable to offer anything of value, unless compassion had value and he doubted that it did. Compassion was only personal. He heard the sergeant call his name, the voice abrupt in the stillness of the moment. The clinic continued to smolder, almost extinguished now; he had no idea if others were inside. Harry had the thought that he was witnessing an event from the deep past, decades past, centuries, and he himself the unwelcome guest, uninvited, a voyeur come to observe the suffering, a simple bystander unable to supply even the most meager assistance—and then he stepped forward to ask the question, What happened here? But the headman paid him no attention and the woman closed her eyes. Her body shivered and seemed to wither, her limbs drooping as if made of putty. Harry had never watched someone die. She made no sound. The headman pulled a flask from the pocket of his jacket and put it to her mou
th, still agape, the water spilling over her chin and falling to her chest, darkening the cloth tunic. The flask was empty and still the headman did not move in his observance of what surely was the last sacrament.

  Harry! the sergeant called, his voice urgent. Then, softly, Get out of there now.

  He stood quietly a minute longer, then stepped back once more. From the interior of the clinic a soldier in fatigues appeared, followed by three more. They wore forage caps that looked to be of U.S. Army issue and their faces were camouflaged with soot. They ignored the headman and the dead woman in his arms, indeed seemed as weary as soldiers anywhere after a long march. Their fatigues were filthy, torn in places. Their carbines were slung carelessly over their shoulders. They were young and three of the four wore wire-rim spectacles, giving them the appearance of students, except for the carbines, now unslung as one of them pointed his at Harry, standing alone twenty paces away. Harry thought they looked at him with curiosity, this tall American in khaki trousers and a blue polo shirt, as if he had just come from the terrace of some suburban country club. They wore no badges of rank, but the oldest, perhaps he was thirty years old, seemed to be the one in charge. The other three were looking at the headman and the dead woman without interest. Harry felt his left leg begin to twitch, the usual sign of nerves. He took one more step backward, his arms at his sides. The elder soldier had locked eyes with him, a frank challenge, daring him to make some move. Either that or something else. All this time in-country and he had never before seen the face of the enemy. This was in the hands of God, Harry thought. He was a believer but thought God was often distracted and careless, not someone to count on. God went His own way—certainly great, but cryptic also. Now the soldier raised his hand in warning but Harry paid no attention, taking a step backward once again. The soldier shouted something and raised his carbine but Harry paid no attention to that, either. He turned his back and walked slowly to the boat, his leg fluttering now like a butterfly wing. The soldier fired just once, the bullet whistling high overhead.