American Romantic

by Ward Just

  Poor Harry, she said. You look tired.

  Interminable sermon, he said.

  Do you go often?

  Couple of times a month, I suppose. More or less.

  The ship’s captain and I went a few weeks ago. Ugly church. That hideous window.

  You don’t like the Connecticut Window?

  Is that what they call it? What does Connecticut mean?

  It’s an American state. Like Bavaria.

  There is nothing like Bavaria in America.

  I’ll take you there sometime. You’ll like it.

  Bavaria? I’ve been to Bavaria.

  Connecticut, he said. Wonderful ocean scenery.

  There is no ocean near Bavaria, she said.

  You have me there, he said.

  I’ll see you at seven, she said, and walked off.

  Don’t be late, Harry called after her.

  Why would I be late? she called back.

  Are you listening?

  I’m listening.

  I don’t think you are. What was I saying?

  Humbug. You were telling me about Humbug.

  I’m through with Hamburg.

  That’s what you said all right. Adieu Humbug. Adieu Neustadt and Binnenalster. Adieu Elbe. Goodbye to German men of the big blond type, arms the size of anvils. After that I lost track. You’ve worn me out.

  Move your foot.

  Why?

  Your toenail is scratching my thigh. You’ve drawn blood, I think.

  Sorry. Unintentional.

  You must keep your feet away from tender places. Also, this hammock is not—suitable.

  We’ve invented a new use, that’s true. The instructions from the manufacturer made no mention of sex in their hammock. Still, sex was not specifically prohibited. I can hear the click of your bracelets, the ones you bought in the market. They sound like castanets. What are you doing?

  Wiping away the blood. And speak softly, please.

  I don’t see any blood. And no one can hear us.

  There was a toenail’s worth of blood.

  That much? Do you really hate the hammock?

  I like the open air, and the hammock allows us to be in the open air, so I suppose I approve of the hammock.

  I’m happy you found me. I saw the ship in the harbor but I wasn’t sure you were on it. I was afraid you’d gone away, as you said you might do. And I had no idea where that might be.

  The boat will be leaving soon, I think. That’s the shipboard rumor. The crew is excited. The officers, too. They hate it here. Everyone complains. Shore leave is tightly supervised because they are so concerned about an incident. We had one last weekend but it was covered up. We have already overstayed our time by one month, and each day there are more patients, so many of them children. They are a resilient people. Built of barbed wire, one of our doctors likes to say. It is unnatural for a ship to be tied to a dock like a tethered bird for months and months.

  What incident?

  The usual thing. One of the orderlies and a bargirl. The orderly was rough with her and she complained and the matter died there. They gave her some money and she went away.

  And you? What about you?

  I don’t know. I may remain. I may jump ship. By the time they realize I am missing, the ship will be miles and miles away. The captain and I are friends. I can get a pass any time I want one. I will leave a note for them explaining what I have done and why. Perhaps not why. Why is none of their concern. I have no desire to return to Hamburg. Hamburg has no meaning for me. I have no affection for the ship. You have complicated things for me. I did not expect someone like you.

  It’s the same with me.

  So we are both complicated with each other.

  Seems so. If you stay here, what will you do?

  I can do something. I don’t know what.

  I can find you something at the embassy. Can you type?

  Of course I can type. I also take dictation. And operate an x-ray, if you have x-rays at your embassy.

  I’ll fix it up. But we’ll have to make up a story.

  What story?

  I can’t tell them that you’ve jumped ship and need a job. That would not do. You have to be here for a reason.

  I am my own reason. I am a tourist. I am here for tourism.

  This is a war zone.

  Is tourism illegal? Where does it say that one cannot be a tourist if one wishes to be a tourist? Tourism is a human right. Do not laugh, I am serious.

  I can see that. I’ll fix it up.

  That would be good. So, then. If I remain, can I stay with you?

  Of course.

  Such a big house you have.

  We’ll have to keep it quiet. You here.

  They don’t like you living with tourists, your government?

  They are not against tourists. They are against communists.

  I am not a communist.

  Exactly. So you have nothing to fear from my government. You should give this a moment’s thought. This place is finished. You have no future here. It is not dangerous now but it will get dangerous.

  The war has nothing to do with me.

  The war doesn’t know that. The war is closely focused, indifferent to anything outside its sphere. It’s remorseless. It works according to its own logic, its context. There will be no end of it.

  Everything has an end, Harry.

  But you don’t have to wait for it.

  As it happens, she said, I prefer beginnings.

  They stared at the stars through the leaves of the ficus tree, the leaves pendulous in the heavy air. When he first arrived in-country, Harry spent many evenings in the silk-string hammock searching for the Southern Cross, until he learned that the Southern Cross was visible only much farther south. Its anchor was Antarctica. He had read about the Southern Cross in Conrad’s books, a mystical constellation, if you could call four lonely stars a constellation. Ancient mariners swore by it. He asked her if she had ever wanted to see the Southern Cross and she replied that she had, on the voyage from Hamburg. The ship’s captain told her all about it and also about celestial navigation, but she was so caught up with the stars she hadn’t listened carefully. He nodded, thinking about the Southern Cross and listening to her bracelets click as she ran a pianist’s riff on his belly. He was unable to fathom how he and Sieglinde had found each other, beyond the prosaic facts of the matter. She had asked him for directions to the post office and he was walking in that direction, and after she had mailed her postcards they had coffee in a café and made a rendezvous for that evening, and now he had what he thought of as a normal life, one of discovery, fresh and erotic, a life apart from the war. Well, the war didn’t have anything to do with it. Anyone could have two selves, a daytime self and a nighttime self, a sort of yin and yang. He could keep the damned war to himself and at night he could go home like any ordinary businessman, forgetting the office. He wondered if Marx, at the conclusion of a raucous sexual encounter with his faithful Jenny, muttered something about each according to his needs . . . He did not. Harry hoped the time would come when he could separate who he was from what he did, except that in America it was always the salient question, the one whose answer spoke volumes. In Britain the same question was deemed intrusive, none of your damned business; if you didn’t know, don’t ask. The ambassador once referred to him as a model government man, a Fed through and through, good at following instructions, very good at reading the opposition. Harry took the remark as a compliment. He supposed he had the manner, coming mostly from his childhood around the Regency table at Sunday lunch. When he was a schoolboy he was often called upon for memory tricks: the states and their capitals, the captive nations that constituted the Soviet bloc. And then he was encouraged to sit and listen while the adults spoke. There was often someone from the government, usually retired and working for a bank or a law firm in the city, and he was the one asked to clarify the awkward questions of the day, the personalities of the men in the Kremlin or the reliability of the
French and, later on, the criminal regimes in Cuba and Red China. The former government official, often a diplomat or Defense Department specialist, less often a White House assistant, usually spoke soberly, one question always leading to another, each more difficult than the last, with a reference somewhere to “holding the line.” There were very many lines. Something glamorous about it, Harry thought, being at the center of events, always at or near the top table. He did pay close attention to the demeanor of the former officials, the way they fell silent at a certain point, eyes far away and stunned as if struck by a sudden blow. But they were only remembering that which could not be said, a secret still secret, information that, if known, would alter the agreed-upon landscape. The ambassador said that the government was excellent preparation for life because in the nature of things you devoted your days to weighing and measuring—what you said and who you said it to and why and the objective, cards always close to the vest. And when you turned one over, sometimes with reluctance, sometimes with nonchalance, you got something for it. The way things were in the world, your queen nearly always trumped your opponent’s king. That was because you held the American card. When to play the card and what you expected to get for it was the essence of the diplomatic art. And you did this every day and the result was: an examined life.

  Sieglinde said, I like your villa. It’s spacious, nicely arranged. I like it here under the stars with you.

  Look, he said. I’d like you to stay. You know that. No question about that, is there? But after a while you won’t like it because there’s no future here.

  But I do like it. I like the tropics. I like the heat and the pace of life, the scurry. A siesta in the heat of the afternoon. Afternoons last forever in the tropics, don’t you think? It’s from another century, this country. And since I don’t care much for this century I’ve decided to choose another, especially the afternoons. I know the war is here but I pay no attention to it. Why should I? The war is not my concern. What time is it?

  Around three, Harry said. In the morning.

  Listen now, Sieglinde said. Not a sound. Not a breath of air. The air has a weight of its own, the scent of your garden and the trees. Can’t you feel the dew falling? That’s why I don’t like Hamburg, its burdens. Clamor. Cold and wind. Rain from the north. You say it’s dead here but it’s not dead, it’s indifferent. You can bend this country but you will never break it. The people have old souls and their patience is infinite. They don’t even think of it as patience. I’m sure they have another word for it in their infernal language that you can’t understand. Germans have patience, too, but we call it thoroughness. Hamburg nights are glum. There’s a glare. The truth is, Germany is badly oversized. There’s too much of it. And I will not stay here forever because German people make bad colonists and that includes me. But I will stay for a while.

  They do?

  Not one of our colonies prospered. Not one.

  What about France?

  Ha-ha. Ha.

  Sorry. Irresistible, Harry said, realizing he had played a queen and gotten nothing for it.

  The French did not want it badly enough.

  Want what?

  Their country, Sieglinde said. They didn’t want it badly enough to fight for it. Or maybe they wanted something else. Maybe they were tired of the life they had and wanted a new one. They were halfhearted.

  I think it’s fair to say they were very badly generaled. And they were overwhelmed, superior force, superior weapons. Soldiers with fight in their blood.

  Always the Third Reich, Sieglinde said. The war is over for years and years and our Third Reich is still with us. Probably it will never go away in my lifetime. My grandparents and my father died in it. And I will say something more. It doesn’t seem like yesterday. When you mention the Third Reich I think about my mother, always. These thoughts are not good thoughts—

  Sorry, Sieglinde.

  When something is irresistible you should resist it, Harry. There is nothing you can tell me about the Third Reich that I do not already know. I think you do not study your surroundings. Also you do not listen with care. Always your own thoughts. I think your war is always inside your head. Don’t bother to deny it. I know it’s true, every minute of the day. You’re like a pianist with a head full of musical notes except your head is filled with the war. No, I do not care to have you kiss me. Kissing avoids the issue. This stupid war of yours. It’s a stupid thing to have in your head at all times.

  You, Harry said. I think about you.

  You must understand I have nothing to do with the Third Reich.

  I know that, he said.

  It’s an accident of nationality.

  I know that, too.

  I have a photograph of my father the day he went away to the war. He was roughly the age that I am now. He wore a wool uniform with corporal’s stripes. His face was full of hope, I would almost say of rapture, as if he were leaving to join a religious order, its specific rituals, chants and choirs, meditations, observances, discipline. The four last things: death, judgment, heaven, hell. He was slender but very strong, a marksman, and so handsome, with a loop of hair that fell over his forehead. Freckles, too, and a mustache that made him look older. He stood not at attention but in a kind of slouch, his rifle held butt-down as a farm boy might hold a pitchfork. My father was a hell-raiser and now he was going east, the Russian front. My mother held the camera and my father was smiling into it, a brilliant smile, the one that was full of hope. I was so young, I thought his uniform was a costume, a clown’s suit or a knight’s armor. My father didn’t last the week, but we did not know that right away. We didn’t know for months and all that time my mother was writing letters to a dead man.

  Harry was silent now, listening to the rise and fall of Sieglinde’s voice, its urgency and melancholy. This was the first he had heard of the war’s progress from the other side, the civilian side, the enemy side. She spoke slowly, her attention fixed not on him but on some distant point in the night sky. He remembered one of his university professors described the American victory as a mixed blessing. Its unambiguous result did not encourage introspection. The victory was total. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the worm of triumphalism began its laborious crawl—though things would look otherwise to a marine waiting in Okinawa for the invasion of Japan. Harry doubted the professor’s sour complaint. He seemed to ask for too much. Yet it was true that a colossus had been born. A colossus was heedless, difficult to manage, so many irons in so very many fires. Three wars in twenty-five years and at last the colossus was forced to look inward. Now it faced an enemy whose will and cunning seemed without limit. The Chinese adage, preposterous when applied to the Military Assistance Command, fit snugly in the mind of the guerrilla force: “To gain, you must yield; to grasp, let go; to win, lose.” He realized that Sieglinde had fallen silent.

  Are you listening to me?

  Yes, Harry said.

  I can stop if you want.

  I don’t want you to stop.

  You want me to shut my mouth.

  No, I do not, Harry said. Believe me.

  My father, she said, was an auto mechanic. A good one apparently. The official notification of his death stated that he died bravely. He did his duty. My mother was bitter and, young as I was, I remember her asking if he died fixing a tank’s engine or the flywheel of a staff car and how many others died with him. Perhaps it was a bomb that fell from nowhere, an unseen aircraft in the night sky. So, Sieglinde went on, our house was never the same. My mother was often absent, foraging. She became a forager for food. We lived in a small town east of Hamburg and when the firebombing came we could see the flicker of lights in the sky and later the west wind blew smoke and debris over our little town. The smell of it was horrible. And in the morning we saw ash on our lawn and the sidewalks, the streets, too. Oh yes, also we heard the explosions, a kind of rolling thunder that went on and on. I am only looking for a place of repose, not so much to ask.

  Sieglinde, Harry began.

/>   I have never told that story to anyone, she said.

  It’s safe with me, Harry said.

  My mother died in the last year of the war, Sieglinde said. It was so cold that winter, the coldest in decades, they said. They told me she died of pneumonia. They did not say where. Her body was not recovered. Perhaps it was pneumonia and perhaps it was something else. I have always thought she just went away to a place of no return. I would not be surprised if she were still alive. So I went to live with my aunt in Lübeck. She didn’t want me. She didn’t know how to feed me. She had barely enough for herself. But we managed. I went to school and later I learned about the x-ray and so I have made a life for myself thanks to my knowledge of the x-ray. I am looking for repose and that is why I came here on the ship.

  As you say, Harry said, not so much to ask.

  No, not so much. Hard to find.

  Maybe this is your place after all, Harry said.

  I shall have to see for myself.

  You are welcome to stay with me. More than welcome. As you can see, I have plenty of room. Of course you would have to jump ship.

  I can do that.

  What’s stopping you?

  I have not made up my mind.

  You would be perfectly safe here. The shooting war is elsewhere, in the countryside. Out of sight, really. I suppose this house could be a place of repose. It’s quiet. I have one servant who keeps to himself. The library is quite good. Do you read French? The house belonged to a French businessman and his wife. A year ago they sensibly decided to return to France.

  So it wasn’t a place of repose for them.

  Evidently, Harry said. I believe they were between the lines, playing a double game. They say the French are good at that, but they aren’t any better than anyone else. It’s exhausting. The family had been here for three generations and now they’ve gone home, some village in the north near Arras. They went there in the summers and now they live there. I met them before they left, a charming couple. They hated leaving. They loved the villa. Among other things, they liked the food here. Accomplished cooks, both of them.

  And you?

  Repose is not in my repertoire. But I have no objection to it.