Forgetfulness

by Ward Just

  Only trying to survive, Thomas repeated.

  Really?

  I believe so, Thomas said.

  Victoria Granger looked him in the eye a long moment, concentrating as if she were lining up a difficult putt. She said, You think such an attitude is admirable. Manly, heroic even. "Lived harmlessly." "Kept to himself." Hide away somewhere and your past will cease to exist. You won't have to account for it. You'll feel no obligation to explain your actions or justify them because you've gone into hiding and promised to cause no more harm. You've gone away and you expect your victims to go away, too. It's like leaving the scene of an accident, wouldn't you say, Mr. Railles? Or a marriage. Even a field of battle.

  Head high, she marched to the door. Then she looked back at him. One last instruction. She said, Only one month ago my great-uncle made a codicil to his will. He left you the billiards table, the cues, the ivory balls, the rack, the chalk. The lot. Wasn't that thoughtful of him? Make arrangements with the notaire to have it delivered.

  And then she was through the door, closing it hard behind her. Thomas stepped to the front window to watch her advance through the snow down the driveway to the road. He wondered what it was she wanted to say about her children before she caught herself; they would be troubles too intimate to be disclosed to a stranger. Bad blood, she said, and all of it the fault of Captain St. John Granger, scapegrace. She did not want to hear that the old man was innocent. Innocent, he lost responsibility. Innocent, he had no value. Thomas believed that with Granger there was nothing to forgive—or nothing Thomas could swear to with confidence. He had no way of knowing if Granger had embellished his résumé, contrived his own narrative, a story he could live with. You either believed him or you didn't. Amnesia was the curse of the modern world, or its redemption, depending on whether you held to the Old Testament or the New. Forgiveness was the consequence of amnesia. This American woman, this Granger descendant, was a hanging judge and Thomas wondered now if this was something fresh in the American character or if it was yet another arid legacy of the joyless Puritan horde, Cotton Mather and his ilk. No doubt the attacks of September 11, 2001, played a part, revenge sweeping the nation. Kill the Islamists and two objectives were accomplished. Vengeance was sweet. They would kill no more, once they felt the full fury of righteous American anger. The Spanish communist had a German word that covered it: Lebenslüge, the lie that makes life bearable. Citizens of the former German Democratic Republic knew it well. Russian troops were not marauders and rapists, they were liberators. East Germans were at last free of the fascist Hitler, owing to the Russian occupation; he was in any case a Western capitalist phenomenon, for whom the Eastern proletariat bore no responsibility. Thomas had the idea that most everyone had a Lebenslüge and Victoria Granger's was her own great-uncle, deserter, coward, scourge of the family, a kind of terrorist. She was a determined woman and he guessed he had not seen the last of her. She certainly walked with purpose. He watched her turn right, in the direction of Granger's house, her head bent against the wind, her scarf flying. But the night was dark and soon he lost her among the drifts and shadows.

  Thomas poured the last of Granger's Bordeaux and switched on the television set, the drizzle of the eight o'clock news. A strike had crippled Charles de Gaulle and Orly, one of every three flights canceled, all delayed. Farmers were outraged at new EC rules concerning livestock and they, too, threatened action in Paris. A car bomb had killed a dozen Iraqis and one American soldier in Baghdad, the bomb concealed in a police car. More Americans were among the injured. The words flew by too fast for Thomas to grasp the details. The news anchor habitually bit his lip for emphasis and this was another distraction. Then the scene shifted to a cemetery in one of the Baghdad suburbs, the funeral of a child killed the day before. The wailing of the women and the howling of the men seemed without limit, anguish beyond words. The women clung to each other and the men to themselves, tugging at arms and shoulders, clothes stained with sweat and tears. Their cries reached to the very heavens, unconsoled, raw, unbridled, final. Thomas moved closer to the television screen, remembering the funeral of a few days before, at Arlington, a Marine captain laid to rest, the American flag carefully folded and handed to his widow, her face partly hidden by a black veil, two very young children at her side, a pantomime in perfect silence until somewhere beyond the gravestones the first baritone notes of taps, limpid in the cold. Thomas found himself near tears, watching the disorder in Baghdad and remembering the restraint at Arlington. Identical grief, dissimilar expression. Not less deeply felt at Arlington—no one watching the widow's trembling fingers could doubt she was near collapse. But she uttered not one word and did not appear to weep. Perhaps she felt her anguish was no one's business but her own and that of her children. Thomas had an idea that Muslims were as a rule restrained in their laughter; more restrained, in any event, than Americans or Europeans. Perhaps the formality of their religion discouraged laughter. Did laughter mock God?

  He turned from the screen to look at Florette's portrait.

  What do you think of that as an idea, chérie?

  Not much, Florette said. American laughter is the worst.

  Have you ever listened to the English? Or the Germans?

  I prefer French laughter, Florette said. Although I do not prefer French television.

  Thomas and Florette had made a ritual of the evening news, Florette translating when he missed a phrase or nuance, when there was any. She made her own commentary on the events of the day, ribald for the most part. She believed the evening news a Paris fantasy designed to lull the good people of the countryside into a bovine sense of well-being, confident that their affairs were being scrupulously handled by skilled civil servants at the many important ministries located in the capital, and if they only knew what the civil servants knew of the complexities of managing a modern industrial state they would sink to their knees in gratitude. And here Florette's ribaldry reached its eight o'clock summit as she gathered the dominoes and commenced to shuffle the bones on the table between them. Then she said in her cool announcer's voice,

  Alors, chéri!

  Fetch the wine.

  The evening news continued, a fast segue into a promo for that night's showcase program, an inquiry into the sources of the civic genius of Bonaparte, the film followed by a panel discussion of leading authorities, including the adorable and provocative communist academic so often in the news. The final item caught Thomas's interest—the anchor chewing on his lower lip with more compassion than usual—for it had to do with the restoration of brown bears to the Pyrenees. The few remaining native bears had died out at last, and eighteen had been imported from the Julian Alps in Slovenia, the Slovenian bears identical in every respect to their lost cousins in the Pyrenees. Schoolchildren had been enlisted to support the importation, which they were delighted to do since all children loved bears. Six-year-olds took to the streets in noisy approval, with the happy result that the bears were now occasionally seen as well as heard, though only at high elevations. A survey showed that bears were the most popular animal in France, a curiosity, since only a few shepherds had ever seen one. And even the shepherds were delighted, since each time a bear fell upon a sheep and dismembered it, the shepherd was compensated to a formula that worked out to twice the sheep's value. Thus was ecological, monetary, and sentimental balance achieved in the great mountains to the south. The segment ended with a grinning child displaying a bear's tooth that had been taken from the skull of one of the unfortunate sheep, as the announcer's compassion spilled over.

  Alors, Thomas said, in a fair imitation of Florette's voice.

  All those walks. We never saw a bear.

  Probably we didn't go high enough.

  Thomas was looking at her portrait over the fireplace. He confessed he was touched by the footage of the bears. Bears were relics of prehistory, drawn on the walls of caves and prominent in European legends, creatures of mythic stature, especially in Russia and Germany. They belonged on mount
ains or in forests, the more remote the better. When Thomas was a boy, brown bears were common in the northern Wisconsin woods, feeding on lake fish and berries, fiercely protective of their young. Thomas had never seen a bear in the wild but he was confident they were wonderful animals. Slovenian bears were welcome in the Pyrenees no less than the mighty birds, the royal eagle and the Egyptian vulture. If it took enthusiastic schoolchildren and cost-conscious shepherds to make it happen, so much the better. Of course there remained the question of whether the bears minded being extirpated from the Julian Alps to the Pyrenees, unfamiliar territory, not that they had any choice in the matter—unlike, say, a human expatriate. That was almost always a matter of choice, and then the choice became a habit, and you learned the language and discovered a fresh persona outside the norms of your own country yet not entirely inside the norms of your new country, and so there were no civic responsibilities. Elections came and went. Prominent citizens died. Your own country changed in unfathomable ways, the ways gathered by the American newspaper and foreign television. The context of things vanished. Still, you were working well, and if you were lucky you found a French woman and settled down with her, and up to a point her context became your context. There were tax advantages also. Bears and expats were brothers. Bears had no tax worries either. There were no secrets for them to hide and nothing for them to be afraid of except trophy hunters and other bears. They wouldn't worry about being condescended to by neurotic Pennsylvania women with chips on their shoulders. They weren't kidding anybody and certainly betrayals were not involved. They were beloved by schoolchildren and even the shepherds became their friends and protectors, and in the winter they retreated to their dens and slept.

  They wouldn't worry about expressions of grief and laughter.

  Thomas opened another bottle of wine, one from his own cellar. He rummaged in the domino box until he found the double-six. He stacked the bones one by one until he had a domino tower a foot high, the blank bone at the summit. It was a beautiful structure, tall, slender, and symmetrical; he could see it standing in downtown Milwaukee, ten, twelve stories high, an ornament of the city. Thomas Railles, architect.

  He removed the stories one by one and returned the bones to the domino box. That left the matter of the billiards table. He poured a glass of wine and tipped it in the direction of the portrait of St. John Granger. The only room in his house large enough for the table was the living room where he sat, so that would be its place. He did not know how you went about playing billiards solo. Billiards, dominoes, gin rummy, all companionable games. Probably you would play it for practice only so that you could know the feel of the cushions and the stick as well as you knew your own body or your lover's body, and no doubt if you thought about it seriously you could invent rules for a game with imaginary opponents. Granger, for example, or Francisco, a kind of round robin of dead men. Billiards was an amiable way of passing the time and Granger's equipment was superb, the sticks as finely balanced as a violin bow; they had been made in Austria at the turn of the previous century. If the table was in the living room it would be as much a part of things as the bookcase or the television set and no two setups would ever be the same. Billiards was a game of infinite variety. He could play billiards while listening to opera or jazz music.

  Thomas needed an evening activity.

  Something that involved repetitive motion.

  Something other than the evening news.

  He reached into the domino box and rebuilt the ivory tower with the blank bone at the summit. He contemplated it a moment, and when he touched it with his finger the tower collapsed and one of the bones splashed into his wineglass. When Thomas glanced at the portrait on the wall above the fireplace, Florette seemed to be staring at him with reproach, her off-center eyes and her mournful mouth, one eyebrow raised. He apologized for comparing her to felt cushions but her expression did not change; then he knew she disapproved of a billiards table in the living room. That was the meaning of her severe expression. Thomas had painted her in a plain white shift in a white room—white walls, white floors, white sunlight. Her skin was pale. He had worked on the portrait for weeks and finished one afternoon in a characteristic burst of speed. At first she had been impatient with the long hours of sitting still and then came to enjoy it, putting herself into a trancelike state, remembering things. She said that sometimes she forgot he was in the room, so complete was her abstraction. When he asked her what she was remembering, she said it was none of his business what she remembered. The last week he worked alone. The oils seemed to him to explode off the canvas. He sat looking at the portrait for an hour before he called her in to see for herself and when she did tears filled her eyes. This was not at all the reaction he had hoped for or expected so for a time he said nothing, allowing her to look at her portrait in her own way before she spoke. But she remained silent for many minutes, motionless as if she were holding her breath.

  Well, he said finally, what do you think?

  Oh, she said. It's beautiful.

  I'm pleased, then, he said.

  Do you mean that?

  Oh, yes, he said. Of course.

  Naturally I wonder, she said.

  Why would you wonder?

  You've made me look so sad, she said, and burst into tears, her hands over her eyes. She made gasping sounds as though she were short of breath.

  He was astonished. That was not his intention at all, and that was not how he saw her. He reached for her and took her in his arms. She was trembling, peeking through her fingers at the portrait.

  She said, White on white on white. You did that with Francisco. And that's the saddest picture you ever painted.

  Look for yourself, she said. Look at the eyes you've given me.

  He explained what he saw in her eyes, which was not sadness or disappointment but understanding. Sympathy, he said, and wit. At some level sympathy implied knowledge and knowledge had a melancholy aspect. He believed that was universally true, no exceptions. When you knew too much you felt a natural distress but that was something quite different from fundamental personal sadness, sadness as a trait, like blue eyes. Her distress was not temperamental but intellectual. They argued the matter all that night and the next night, and in the end there was no resolution. God, she was stubborn. So the portrait had not been a success, at least with Florette, and he never forgot the sound of her weeping, a moan that seemed to reach to the heavens.

  Freehand

  JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS Thomas received a long handwritten letter from Bernhard Sindelar, postmarked Washington. Bernhard had been called back to headquarters for a conference, a general review of current operations with special attention to methods and sources, connecting dots while they walked back the cat, a dispirited and dispiriting exercise. Morale was terrible, the fudge factory's bureaucracy nervously broken down without energy enough for rebellion. Congress was asniff, the Pentagon frightened, and the White House in deep prayer. So many of the old boys had retired that Bernhard was now the senior field man, sitting around the long table with people young enough to be his children and, in two cases, his grandchildren. "The problem here is Gulliver's problem, if you get my meaning." Still, he was able to bring the youngsters one or two items of interest, pristine material from impeccable sources, produce from Tiffany's window. They were childlike in their appreciation, Bernhard said, going so far as to offer a polite round of applause. And so there'll be no fuss about the renewal of my contract. As to the urgent matter at hand, he had nothing new to report. Several promising leads had fizzled, but one was very much alive. Not Tiffany-window produce but not dross, either. Stay tuned, Thomas. More anon. I know you're anxious but these things always take time, as you know. The goods were almost certainly still in France. No one had given up, and in time they would find what they were looking for. No doubt of that, none whatever. And when the time came they would set about doing what they did best, breaking faces, an honorable revenge for a terrible wrong. And the score would be settled. The let
ter ended with a long paragraph of instructions, one old friend to another. Sixty years of friendship, Thomas, so trust what I say.

  It's evident to me that you're not cut out for the country. You're an urban man, a rootless cosmopolitan, as a matter of fact, wholly unsuited to the rustic life. You should sell the Schloss and head at once to the Sixth Arrondissement. It's time you kissed the dreary weather in dreary Aquitaine bye-bye. You need a time-out, Thomas. Come to London, take a cruise, go skiing, find a girlfriend, see a bullfight, attend the opera, get out of the house. By the way, Russ is in Tripoli but should return to Paris very soon. He wants to see you, and sends this reminder: Degas is at the Grand Palais until the end of January.

  Thomas read the letter in front of the fire and when he was finished pitched it into the flames, Bernhard's standing orders. He wondered if Russ was truly in Tripoli or if Tripoli was code for Tbilisi, Timbuktu, or Trenton. Thomas never knew which parts of Bernhard's letters to believe. His friend was at heart a fabulist, living always for a glimpse of Tiffany's window, contemplating honorable revenge by breaking faces, quick to issue instructions in the certainty that he knew best what was good for you, anticipating applause. Bernhard Sindelar was a stranger to solitude and unacquainted with doubt and that was what made him a capable intelligence agent. Also, people were afraid of him, his glare and his huge hands. Thomas would have been afraid of him too, except they had been friends for so long. Even so, Bernhard's bite was much worse than his bark.

  For the hundredth time that day Thomas wondered if he should buy a Christmas tree and a wreath for the front door, decorations they had always had when Florette was alive. He poured a glass of wine and went to the billiards table, selected a cue, and began to practice three-cushion shots, drastic angles. Dead men's round robin. After a while, studying the drastic angles, he was able to put Bernhard's letter and the last-paragraph instructions out of his mind. The prediction that Florette's killers were still in France was alarming. He didn't want them in France or anywhere. He had nearly succeeded in forgetting about them altogether, as one does with unwelcome strangers who arrive unannounced, invading one's domain, troubling one's sleep. In that sense they were dream-visitors. He concentrated hard while he chalked his cue. Maybe a wreath, he thought. No tree.