by Ward Just
Seaborne Potemkin village, he said.
You had to show the flag, Harry said.
Of course. Charles de Gaulle insisted on it. As did his successors, not quite with the same panache. We had to keep up with the Anglo-Saxons. Or appear to try to keep up.
Harry laughed, the admiral so loquacious. He said, How did you get into the diplomacy business? The admiral smiled broadly and commenced a long story involving a friend who lobbied the Élysée on his behalf, arguing that a retired admiral was owed a billet in the diplomatic service, perhaps envoy to a country that desired a navy. And France had boats for sale, beautiful boats just north of obsolete, boats waiting for a customer.
And that was successful, Harry said.
Yes, the admiral said. They gave me the Légion d’honneur.
You were a good salesman, Harry said.
Yes I was, the admiral said. And you. What was your moment of success?
Harry waited a long minute, weighing the answer.
He said, I killed a man.
Christina’s hand went to her mouth, an audible gasp. The admiral refilled their glasses. Neither spoke.
During my war, Harry said. I was very young. My first serious assignment. I was sent to a remote part of the country to meet with a representative from the other side, see if they were interested in a negotiated settlement. They weren’t. The rendezvous was a failure all the way around. I was obliged to find my way home, and during the trek I came upon a militiaman. Or he came upon me. I knocked him down, took his carbine, and shot him. I think about it all the time. I wonder if there was another solution. However, at that moment, none presented itself.
The admiral cleared his throat. That was a success?
I survived, Harry said. He didn’t.
How awful for you, Christina said.
Yes it was, Harry said. For him, too.
And the consequences, the admiral said. Your ambassador—
I can’t go into that, Harry said.
We will not speak of it further, the admiral said.
They went on to talk of other things, good postings, bad postings. The air in the room was heavy. Harry told them the African story, May’s miscarriage, the utter unexpectedness of it. May’s distress, her conviction that she had done something wrong, that the event was her fault. Nothing could dissuade her. The death of their little girl remained with her for the rest of her days. Christina looked at him with sympathy while he talked and said finally that May had told her the same story. May talked on and on about causes. She said she felt she had been marked. Chosen in some way. That what had happened to her was foreordained, a punishment for misdeeds. And that she would never bear children, that was a punishment also. May was most upset telling the story, Christina said. She did say that you were wonderful during her ordeal. Strong. I had the feeling, Christina said, that she had not sorted things out in her own mind. That there was something she was missing. Harry listened carefully and when Christina was finished he shook his head and said only, I had no idea. What misdeeds was she talking about? She didn’t say, Christina said. Africa certainly was not her sphere. She was unprepared. Harry supposed that was true as far as it went. Unpreparedness was a problem generally. Christina leaned forward, gestured, opened her mouth—but said nothing. May had told her of a liaison with a careless Belgian. A night to remember, May said. Her story was incomplete and there was surely no need to speak of it now or ever. Christina knew Africa, a difficult region under any circumstances. Lately the Chinese had arrived, supposedly looking for agricultural land, and perhaps they could make headway amid the violence and disorganization but she doubted it. Confucius himself, with his affective concern for all living things, would have his hands full. The admiral rose to fetch another bottle of marc, commencing a complicated story involving corruption at the Élysée, something to do with a real-estate swindle and the subsequent—what do you Americans call it?—cover-up. The admiral went on and on about the swindle and the atmosphere at the Élysée, reminiscent of Simenon’s low-rent milieu. Christina made her night-nights and went off to bed, leaving Harry, the admiral, and the bottle of marc in a suspended zone of silence.
The admiral cleared his throat and said, What have you learned, Harry?
Harry’s mind was elsewhere. He said, I beg your pardon?
Your career, the admiral said. The American foreign service. Your postings, Africa and the others, Oslo. Here. So many years abroad. What have the years taught you?
Harry was quiet a moment. He said, My father’s table.
The admiral smiled. I could say, I see. But that would end our interesting conversation. The fact is, I do not see. Explain your father’s table. Or, if you wish, tell me to piss off. Mind my own business.
Harry was quiet once again. Then he said, I grew up in Connecticut. That’s like growing up in your château country down near the Loire. Most Sundays we’d have a splendid lunch with the squires, our neighbors, a congresswoman and her husband, a professional soldier and his wife, two bankers, other locals, including a retired ambassador and various characters who had been in and out of government. The congresswoman was an excellent mimic and hilarious as she went about describing the legislative sausage machine. Brigadier General Candless was similarly superb on military science and tactics, including the Bulge in 1944. He had taken part in it. The bankers were entertaining as they went about demystifying Wall Street, or trying to. Where my mother and father fit into this company I cannot say, except they were fine hosts. They set a fine table. Everyone was fond of them. I think it’s fair to say my parents established a sphere of intimacy, almost of confidentiality, at their Sunday table. No one had to say, This stays in the room among us. Everyone knew that the conversation stayed in the room, and the remarkable, or contradictory, fact was that indiscretions were rare. These were people of the wider world and sexual or financial escapades had no real interest for them unless a president, a secretary of state or defense, or the speaker of the House was implicated, whereupon the worm of malice began to crawl as at any other table. But that aside, the company rarely spoke of current events but of things of the past, the general’s campaigns, the congresswoman’s battles with Senator Joe McCarthy. Elections won and lost, wars won, stalemated, or lost, promises kept, promises broken. I would say also that the atmosphere was often melancholy. At my father’s table failure was more instructive, more revealing, than success.
The admiral nodded thoughtfully, adding a ghost of a smile.
Thing was, Harry went on, all the stories they told had something missing. This, it seemed to me then as it does now, is common among government people. Congresswoman Finch, for example, in describing the eternal struggle over foreign aid was meticulous in her account of who said what to whom and when, the politics of it, the influence of lobbyists. But at a certain point she shrugged and changed the subject. To go beyond that certain point might have—would have—undermined faith in the system. She had realized she was addressing—I suppose the word would be civilians. Brigadier General Candless was eloquent on the progress of the Battle of the Bulge, an account drawn from a set-piece annual lecture he delivered to senior cadets at West Point. He had the names of the principal officers and their units, which performed well and which performed badly. The flow of the engagement. He had the German order of battle. He noted the weather, the terrain, and the fortifications. He quoted from diaries and after-action reports. Still, there was something between the lines where you found a hint of something else, something excruciating, beyond words, unspeakable. The hint was indistinct, a single voice in the chorus of a thousand. Brigadier General Candless was an intelligent man and knew a blank space when he saw it, and the same was true of Congresswoman Finch, even the bankers. As they were talking there would come a moment when their voices trailed off and any attentive listener would know they were deep in their memories, pondering what they were unable—not unwilling but unable—to say aloud. The missing piece. All the stories had missing pieces that spoke to motive an
d perhaps misprision or something very like misprision. This was something personal and inexplicable, the fact that refused to fall in line with the other facts. A black-sheep fact, important enough to make a tidy account a little less tidy. To grasp it you had to have been there. More than any other single thing you had to understand the context, what was at stake and the consequences. No civilian could know that, even the worldly civilians around the Regency table at my father’s house. These were inside jobs. That was the world they lived in, Harry said, and the world I’ve known since I was seven years old. I was attracted to it. I still am. And then in the bat of an eye I was fifty years old and an ambassador myself, searching, as Dean Acheson put it, like a blind man in a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there. And do you want to know something else? The stakes are not small. This world is filled with mischief, and more than mischief. Time retreats. Time advances. Time is discontinuous. Time is always in motion, like the waves of a great sea. And failure is more commanding than success.
The admiral leaned forward, poured wine, and softly said, Formidable. And what—
We will not speak of it further, Harry said in French, and the admiral barked a laugh.
Harry turned the embassy over to his DCM when he received the news that he was reassigned back to Washington and a position in the Department Secretariat, what he knew to be his last post in government. His days now were the sheerest drudgery, packing up his files, designating some, not many, for the burn bag, others for the archives, still others for the Department files, a few for his office safe. He was distracted, his mind elsewhere. More than once he put a file in the burn bag that was meant for the archives and vice versa. Harry did retain his diaries, mostly appointment daybooks kept by his faithful secretary—the foreign minister for lunch, the DCM at four p.m., cocktails at the Portuguese embassy at seven. The small change of diplomatic life. He was surprised that there was so little that could be described as personal. Hardly anything at all. A thick file was reserved for arms deals, mostly paperwork from the Pentagon when it suited them, with an occasional query from an assistant secretary of state: Is this truly necessary? Or, depending on the politics of the administration: Why can’t we do this right now? Usually the Pentagon went its own way, putting Harry in mind of the observation about nineteenth-century Prussia being not a state with an army but an army with a state. And when Harry replied that the deal was neither necessary nor desirable, it sometimes died. Not often enough. Arms deals rarely died, merely went into intensive care, only to return a few months later in excellent health, like the living dead. Harry opened his desk drawer and removed his personal phone book, bought by May at Cassegrain in Paris, organized by country—and so many of the names blacked out owing to death or disappearance. He put that in his briefcase, remembering how pleased May was with her purchase. It came with a Montblanc pen but the pen was long since lost. Harry had asked his DCM to keep his personal things in the embassy basement until he decided where he would live after his hitch at the Secretariat. He had made no firm decision concerning his retirement venue but thought that the south of France sounded about right, a domain close to the sea for sure, some quiet and anonymous property where he might from time to time hear the moo of a cow. Not so anonymous, however, that a railway station wouldn’t be nearby and offer fast-train service to Paris. He would require a small car to get around. Necessary also would be an open porch with a view of the Mediterranean. An American kitchen. Bookshelves in every room. Some country place close to a village with a decent restaurant. Harry knew that something suitable would turn up. It always had before.
The most difficult task he put off until the last week. That was sorting May’s clothes and arranging for them to be sent to one of the local charities. An especially pretty silk blouse and a black Gucci bag he would give to Christina Noiret. May’s smell clung to the blouse. In the recesses of her bedroom closet he found a dozen albums of her photographs and the unfinished typescript of her life of Goya, another of her projects, this one begun in Washington; he couldn’t remember the year, but it was post-Africa. May confided that she had run out of material and, well, she needed access to the Prado or wherever Goya’s papers were kept, if there were any papers. As things stood she could not see Goya whole or even partway but wasn’t that the usual thing with artists? What you had to go on was the work and not much else. Also, they tended to be liars, as smooth as a snake-oil salesman. And the Apocalypse was always near. An exception would be Van Gogh in his letters to brother Theo, always candid even when asking for money. Probably there were exceptions to the general rule. Honestly, she didn’t know much about it, the sincerity issue. She loved Goya’s work and when you came down to it the artist was secondary to the work. For her fortieth birthday Harry bought her a print from the “Capricios” series, the one of the blushing bride-to-be crowded by her elderly and leering suitor and her devastated family, save for her cynical papa. The dowry this time would go the other way. Goya called the piece Qué Sacrificio! What a sacrifice! May loved the print and hung it in their bedroom next to a photograph of her and Harry on their wedding day, at a restaurant in Montparnasse, before them a giant platter of oysters and a bottle of Perrier-Jouët in a silver bucket. May had never eaten an oyster and had to be shown the technique and the uses of the lemon and mignonette. Forget the fork and slip the oyster from the shell to your tongue and wait a moment. May was laughing and never looked lovelier.
Harry had never been in her closet. Most everything had been given away. The closet looked forlorn, with a well-worn blue robe and slippers tucked into a corner ready for the garbage bin. The closet was dusty and dark and he almost missed the two remaining items, a heavy manila envelope and her diaries. He had not known she kept a diary. He looked at them a long minute, wondering about the contents. He picked up the diaries and weighed them in his hands like a goldsmith assaying value. There were four diaries with entries written in a close-hauled script. Here and there were sentences written in a five-number code. He remembered a dinner in Africa with the station chief years ago when she asked about codes, how you went about making them and deciphering them in a way that was simple and easy to remember. The station chief was a connoisseur of codes and cryptology and went on and on about letter codes and number codes, the Vigenère Square with its keyboard, and much else besides. A classic five-number code was efficient and he explained how that was constructed. May was fascinated. She couldn’t hear enough about codes. Harry riffled the pages of the diaries but did not read them. Diaries were notoriously unreliable, a furtive means of settling scores. That which the diarist did not dare to speak aloud she committed to paper, and hid the paper. These diaries were the size and weight of a short hardcover book, leather-bound, the pages ruled. Harry thought they had a sinister aspect, something forbidden. The black leather binding, the ruled pages, the five-number codes here and there, all of it composed in a dense hand.
You fox, he said aloud.
But what he saw was a hand reaching from an open grave.
Harry looked around their bedroom, the bureaus and their big bed with the red pillows and heavy duvet. Photographs on the bureaus, even one of her family sitting on the steps of their house in Slother. Their room, her arrangements. The air was close, as if he were underground. Harry scooped up the diaries and the manila envelope and moved downstairs to his office and set the diaries one by one on his desk. The manila envelope he put to one side.
The late-afternoon sun cast a dull milky glow on the figured carpet. He remembered buying the carpet in Tunisia. The rug was May’s choice. She was having the time of her life bargaining with the rug man, a fat bastard with a neatly trimmed beard and merry little eyes. Harry picked up the diaries and thought about the rug man in Sfax. The hotel in Sfax was mediocre. Mediocre suite, mediocre food, and in the dining room three tables of Germans with parade-ground voices. He was ambassador in Oslo then, and he and May had taken a week in Tunisia because of the appalling Norwegian February. When the carpet arrived a month lat
er May insisted he lay it in his office to give the room a dash of color. He scarcely remembered a thing about Tunisia except the fat bastard, the hotel, the Germans, and his aching feet. He thought about the heat and the hotel and the Germans and his feet and the rest of it, knowing that he had willed himself to stray ever so slightly off the point, holding in his hands a poison pill, diaries that would give clues to secrets held—better yet, the secrets themselves, innermost secrets, secrets that went unspoken, secrets private enough that some of them were written in code. He had never kept a confessional diary and never read one. He did not as a matter of principle read other people’s mail—and then he laughed out loud because he read other people’s mail all the time. The station chief walked in with a sheaf of papers, handing them over with a thin smile. Wait’ll you read this, Harry! Unbelievable! They were transcripts of conversations in the presidential palace or the defense ministry, a café on the wrong side of town or a hotel room, and Harry would dig in as at a four-course meal. Not Oslo. No need to bug the friendly Norwegians. But at every other posting he had had there was a lively traffic in intercepted conversations. So principle had nothing whatever to do with a decision to read or not to read his wife’s diaries except to satisfy his own curiosity, with no doubt a disturbing surprise somewhere along the line, a bitter payback from someone loved at once and forever, loved from the moment of hello and the breathless hesitation after hello, the crowded bar, Sure, I’d like to join you and your friends; and within an hour or so the friends disappeared, leaving you both in a companionable climate of silence before the conversation began and could be said to have continued until this very moment. No need to strip someone clean in order to satisfy the itch of curiosity. Something narrow-minded about it. Vulgar. Fear was in there somewhere, too, an apprehension. No good could come of this. Now was not the time. At last Harry shook his head decisively and threw the diaries into the burn bag. If he did not read them now he would never read them, so what was the point of keeping them? He had an illusion and he would remain with the illusion, the unopened door. Often enough the more you knew the less you understood. As for the diarist—the diarist had a right of privacy, even the dead, and perhaps the dead most of all.
