Forgetfulness

by Ward Just

  Thomas told himself he was under no obligation to wait for Bernhard's telephone call. Bernhard with his bluster, his certainties, and his insistence on score-settling, and not only his scores but your scores, too. Someone once called Bernhard Sindelar a godless son of a bitch, a judgment that Thomas thought a bit harsh but now he wasn't so sure. Still, they had been friends for sixty years and would go on being friends because they knew so much about each other and Thomas was in his debt, not that Bernhard knew or cared. That was the rub of it, Bernhard's fascination with the patients in the doctor's waiting room, and his inquisitive eye for the patient in most distress. Bernhard had seen something that Thomas had not seen, and thereafter that which had been most familiar became strange yet fraught with meaning. His father's waiting room became a stage set. The low ceiling, the dark walls, the narrow windows that admitted little light, the functional chairs, the tables with their burden of thumbed magazines, the settee by the window that his father designated the smokers corner, a standup metal ashtray on either side of the settee, the sort of ashtray found in men's clubs. A few years later The Waiting Room became Thomas's first attempt at ensemble portraiture, realism in the manner of Georges de La Tour, though his art instructor at the time thought the piece owed more to Norman Rockwell—admitting reluctantly that Rockwell would not have used such somber colors, nor given the room such a shabby appearance, and surely a Rockwell would have had the doctor's kindly face appear at the door of the examining room, summoning the next patient. The doctor was not present in Thomas's waiting room, only the patients, in attitudes of anticipation or dread. He gave his father's likeness to the middle-aged man on the settee, a cigarette in his fingers, nonchalantly turning the pages of Time magazine. Bernhard Sindelar was the boy in the wing chair, a bandage on his forehead, a sullen expression on his mouth. The woman next to Bernhard was Thomas's mother, her face turned so that her features could not be seen. Her body was a blur of dark wool, her purse in her lap. Her purse caught the eye of the viewer, perhaps because her fingers were tight on its handle, as if it contained not only her worldly goods but her soul as well. And all the time Thomas was painting the picture he was imagining his father behind the closed door; the force of the picture was the closed door. So he owed Bernhard Sindelar his attention, and when the call came he would answer it. Of course the message would have to do with Florette, some "break" in "the case" that would bring "closure." But no break in this or any other case could bring her back to him, so what was the point?

  He did not have the energy for it, or the desire. Desire in all forms had left him and what he wanted now was to live quietly in a simple fashion, keep his own counsel, and find a means to begin painting again. The churches were a beginning, and in their authority and stillness as good a beginning as he was likely to get. He lacked anger of the sort that swept all before it and became a cause in itself, a way of life, the anger of the American in old Bardèche's café not long after September 11. His friends had called him Jock, a boy-man whose anger defined him. His anger was directed at the world as a whole, meaning anyone who got in his way. The lawless world had robbed him of his sight and the lawless world would pay, and if he found a simple café in the French countryside wearing a hostile face, then the café would pay, too. Thomas also recalled the confusion of those in the café, grown silent, divided between sympathy for the blind man and outrage at his behavior and that of his friends, who so enjoyed an atmosphere of menace, establishing a would-be tyranny. They looked at the blind man and saw some aspect of themselves, had the cards fallen differently. When the blind man lunged at old Bardèche and crashed into the table the room went dead still, and then came a heavy sigh of regret and dismay. The episode was so unsettling that he and Florette spoke of little else for days. She said it was as if September 11 were present in the village—at least the aftershocks were. And he had said yes, that was one of the objectives. A month later they were married in the church.

  She said to him that night, I don't want us to be a part of the American war on terror.

  He said, We won't be.

  I can't get the blind American out of my mind.

  Me either, he said.

  But we're safe here, aren't we?

  Of course, Thomas said.

  Not one death or a hundred deaths, silent or noisy deaths, public or private deaths, could bring him consolation. What nonsense to speak of consolation. The dead had consolation for eternity, but the living went on living with the consequences of the lives they had made for themselves, and consolation didn't come into it. Thomas became aware of sudden desolation, as if a knife's blade had pierced his heart. The feeling was physical, a sharp pain that reached to his marrow, and for a moment he wondered if he was having a cardiac event of the sort that had killed his father so many years ago, his father looking up from his dinner plate with an expression of the utmost bafflement, carefully putting down his knife and fork, and falling from his chair in slow motion, dead when he struck the floor. He had uttered no sound. Remembering his father's untenable expression, Thomas now sat very still, his charcoal pencil in his hand, raised as though he were aiming a dart at a distant target. His vision blurred, the fields of snow weaving before his eyes. He swallowed once and held his breath, then exhaled slowly, searching for neutral respiration. He felt very tired.

  Thomas let the pencil fall and watched as it rolled across the uneven surface of the kitchen counter. The pain stayed with him a minute or more before it eased, slipping away. His sense of desolation remained. The landscape was unfamiliar. The blackbirds had vanished, the field was in motion before his eyes, the land rising to burst forth in snow-capped mountains, Spain beyond. The sun seemed to him less bright though there were no clouds, and for a second he thought he heard Florette's step. Far in the distance he saw the spire of the church at St. Michel du Valcabrère. He listened hard for any sound but he heard nothing. Thomas's breathing was now near normal and he took a sip of coffee, his hand trembling. The landscape appeared to him in shadows until he heard the bells tolling the noon hour and he knew at once where he was, as if he had turned a page in a picture book and found himself looking at the Arc de Triomphe or the wood-paneled bar of the Pfister Hotel. He wondered what his father saw in his last seconds. Probably he saw nothing at all. A religious would assert he had glimpsed the void beyond the stunned expressions of his wife and son, some intimation of the presence of the afterlife; then Thomas realized he had no idea of his father's religious convictions. Father and son talked about politics, medicine, sports, and sex. They often discussed the delivery of bad news, the terms a doctor used and the tone of voice he employed using them. He and his father were not churchgoers, not even on the holy days, and "holy days" was not an expression the doctor would ever use. Thomas's mother took care of the family church business most conscientiously and so presumably did not die bereft. Thomas looked again at the sketches he had made that morning, discouraged at the very facility of the work, five-finger exercises. He picked up the sketches and turned them over so that he wouldn't have to look at them.

  Instead, he looked at the telephone with something like dread.

  Come on, he said aloud. Get it over with.

  Then he gathered up his sketchpad and charcoal pencil and stepped outside into a splash of sunlight. The air was cold and he stood looking at Big Papa, its ridges and summit blending into the mountains behind it. Sunlight blinded him so he began to sketch freehand, not looking at the pad, his fingers guiding the unseen pencil. Almost at once his spirits rose, work a kind of catechism. Thinking was optional. Thomas believed in work the way a pious soul believed in God and the hereafter; that was the way his father approached medicine. In his life Dr. Railles took nothing else seriously. Medicine was life and death, and his family was pleasure, a respite at the end of the day. He was fond of saying that his family made his medicine possible, not realizing that he was telling his wife and son, You are in second position. His wife understood this well enough, as did his son, but much later, w
hen Thomas himself was in thrall to his own work. There was no room for anything else. And then came Bernhard and Russ of the outfit-with-the-unseen-hand, proposing odd jobs, nothing arduous, nothing dangerous, nothing that would interfere with his real work, and indeed he would be able to continue his portrait-making and be amply rewarded. The faces he drew were never less than interesting and a few were exceptional. Thomas liked to remember that Caravaggio began life as a thief.

  The sun slipped behind a cloud.

  He liked the idea of Karen in Holland.

  Thomas, drawing freehand, was looking at the church spire in the distance but not seeing it. Much later he knew he had made a mistake undertaking the off-book odd jobs, his larks. After the encounter with Francisco in the adobe west of Granada, he gave them up altogether. He was in over his head. Florette thought so, too, though she did not know what the jobs were about and by the time she came into his life Thomas had definitively retired. All that remained were the occasional visits by the men and women with briefcases and tape recorders, investigators from Senate committees and historians from the Pentagon, think-tank specialists, and once a harassed assistant from the National Security Council. None of them knew what they wanted, only that, whatever it was, Thomas Railles was the man to provide it. He explained about them to Florette the afternoon in the café when the Americans had made such a scene; he couldn't think what made him tell her except that it seemed the right thing to do.

  She had a right to know. They were to be married, after all.

  Florette had listened to him in silence, her expression telling him that she did not understand everything he was saying. Later, when she met Thomas's friends, she confided that she liked Russ more than she liked Bernhard. She recognized the particular intimacy of friendships that began in the schoolyard and ended in the mortuary so she did not insist on her point of view. Bernhard she thought not thoroughly aboveboard, not the sort of man you'd trust with an important secret. He had so many secrets of his own, why would he care about yours? She thought his hair was a symbol of his unruly nature, a refusal to domesticate himself. Also, she believed he was ambiguous sexually. She asked, Does he like boys? Thomas's answer to that was yes, and girls, too, and Bernhard saw no reason to keep that side of his life to himself.

  Florette believed Thomas was at a disadvantage with Bernhard and Russ; they were altogether more experienced and worldly than Thomas, not to say sinister. Not to say reckless. Not to say rough in their judgments.

  You should be careful with them, Thomas.

  I think you are sometimes naive.

  They take advantage of your good nature. So be careful, please.

  I've heard that before, Florette. I knew what I was doing.

  Not entirely, she said.

  Yes, entirely.

  She said, What was a lark to you was not a lark to them.

  I knew that, too, Thomas said. Basta.

  She said, Thomas, you are an optimist.

  He held his tongue. The French liked to equate optimism with innocence, an endemic American condition, and who was to say they were wrong? Yet one evening he was obliged to mention that the French, too, had their moments of sublime naiveté. How else to explain the rapture of the avant-garde with the Soviet system—Jean-Paul Sartre came to mind—an expression of innocence and optimism so wild you could imagine the French intelligentsia en bloc succumbing to a collective case of the vapors.

  That's different, she said.

  The field seemed to move before his eyes, a deer struggling through the snow, high-stepping and pausing every few yards to move her snout, sniffing, getting her bearings, watching for enemies. She looked exhausted, the soft snow a foot deep, and deeper on the slopes of the hillocks that ran away to St. John Granger's empty farmhouse. The deer had no obvious destination and no companions. In a moment she turned to climb the rise of a hillock, the snow only a few inches deep at the top. She stood quiet as a sentry, turning her head and then freezing to a statue, having heard or sensed something, her snout quivering. She moved her haunches and looked directly at him, an accusing look, the pitiless glare of an executioner. And then she flew off down the slope and disappeared, the field quiet again in the noonday sun. Thomas's fingers danced across the sketchpad, his concentration complete, happy that the strokes were still there, that they had not vanished during the night. Artwork demanded an optimistic temperament, a belief that what was there yesterday would be there tomorrow and the day after tomorrow. Now he was aware of a ringing telephone.

  Thomas walked back into the house and picked up, listening to Bernhard's brusque greeting and returning it in kind. He began to sketch as soon as he heard the voice, drawing his friend as he imagined him speaking, voice low and close to the receiver, his confidential take-no-prisoners voice, glowering, thin-lipped, and remorseless. Stripped of its weird code, this was what he said:

  Gendarmes in Le Havre had arrested a middle-aged Moroccan on a drug charge, nothing too severe, but his manner was so evasive they decided to investigate further. They found a reason to declare his papers not quite in order and were able then to hold him without formal charge and without—supervision. The gendarmes transferred control to agents of a special branch of the security services, who put him through the mill, one interrogation after another. They found a notebook in his hotel room that yielded no names but did have an address in Marseilles, and the address did lead to names that were known to the agents, though these names were in no way drug-related. The names were political, different nationalities, similar politics. So they ran their middle-aged Moroccan through the names one by one and after a week of round-the-clock interrogation he made one small slip—chemically induced, but no one was watching—in a high unnatural voice, as if he were reciting a classroom lesson.

  The Moroccan said, Goodbye, Florette.

  They checked the name on their databases without much hope of success. They had no date, they had no place. Florette was a common name in France, perhaps not so common as Françoise or Florence, but common enough. But they were smart about it. One thing led to another and at last they had Florette DuFour, deceased under violent circumstances—"wrongful death"—and next to her name was the name of an official at the American embassy, Paris. Before the day was out Bernhard had been notified. The Moroccan was being held incommunicado in Le Havre, well looked after, receiving medical attention as needed. Would you like to talk to him, Monsieur Sindelar? And what precisely is your interest in this case?

  And there we are, Bernhard said.

  Thomas sketched in Bernhard's eyes and the comma lines around them, busy eyebrows above.

  Damn good police work, Bernhard said.

  Yes, Thomas said.

  They have him at a safe house in Le Havre, Bernhard went on. He's a tough nut. Self-possessed, I would say. And drugs are the least of his offenses, and as a matter of fact the drug charge was bogus. He's scum. He and his friends have caused trouble wherever they've been, and they've been all over the world. Bernhard sighed, cursing under his breath. They have all the toys of the modern businessman. This one even has a Swiss bank account.

  Thomas said, Friends?

  Three friends, Bernhard said.

  What are his politics?

  We think he's a freelancer. They all are. Basque, Al Qaeda, Tamil, Chechen, Polisario. Hell, I don't know. Whoever pays.

  Mercenaries, Thomas said.

  That's what we think. When Thomas didn't reply, Bernhard went on, Question is, do you want to see him? Watch the interrogation, and when the time comes have a word or two with him yourself. Our French friends are convinced that he and his three chums were with Florette when she died. And that gives you a specific, personal interest.

  See him?

  I can arrange it. The French are being damn good about it, very cooperative. They owe me a favor.

  Has he talked about Florette?

  Not yet. He has to rest up. He's been through the mill, you bet. He has to get his strength back. His brains unscrambled. Bern
hard paused to laugh. He's hurting a little. He doesn't know what we know. He doesn't know what he's given away or if he's given anything away. The French are superb, really good. You watch through a two-way mirror.

  The interrogation?

  Yes, the interrogation.

  Thomas thought a moment and then he asked, What does he look like?

  Look like?

  Yes, his face. Thin, fat, clean-shaven, bearded. What?

  What do you care?

  Small eyes? Large? Thomas penciled in Bernhard's eyes as he spoke, making them large and dead.

  Shit, Thomas. Fat-faced, I suppose. Swarthy. What you might expect. He looks like a Moroccan, for Chrissakes. Hard to read, though. It's fair to say his face is not an open book. Do you see what I'm saying here?

  Thomas did not reply.

  So do you want to see him or not?

  I don't know, Thomas said.

  What do you mean you don't know?

  I don't know whether I want to see him. Why would I? Thomas tried to imagine the encounter. Would the object be to introduce remorse, make Mr. Morocco feel badly? Shout at him? He didn't care what Mr. Morocco felt or didn't feel. In any case, he did not think remorse would be in his repertoire of feelings. Thomas said again, Why would I?

  I think he killed Florette, Bernhard said.

  I have nothing to say to him.

  Is that what you want me to tell the French?

  Thomas poured a cup of coffee from the carafe on the sideboard. Without realizing he was doing it, Thomas had given Bernhard a kaffiyeh and a thick, close-cut beard and wire-rimmed eyeglasses in front of his marble eyes. If the Moroccan had, as Bernhard alleged, a Swiss bank account, then wouldn't a homburg be suitable? Somehow Thomas doubted the Swiss bank account, a Bernhard fiction. Would it give him satisfaction to slap the Moroccan? Hit him very hard, make him cry out, perhaps weep because of the pain?