Forgetfulness

by Ward Just

  Thomas said, When this is over you're welcome at St. Michel. Any time. Or I'll meet you in Paris. We can see the Degas.

  Yes, the Degas.

  We'll be able to talk.

  I'll be staying on here awhile, Russ said.

  I understand.

  What are you doing in Flanders, Thomas?

  Looking for St. John Granger. I found him, too. I'm looking at the monument right now. Granger and seventy-two thousand others. It's cold, the wind is blowing, and I'm about to return to Amiens and get a train for Paris and another train to Toulouse and with luck I'll be home by midnight.

  How did things go in Le Havre? Did it help, seeing them?

  The question was sudden and Thomas paused before answering. No, I don't think it did. I didn't expect it to. I don't know what I expected. Nothing good, that's for sure. I had a conversation with the head man. Nothing conclusive there, either, except they thought Florette was American, not that it made much difference. Did you ever watch torture up close?

  Once, Russ said. A prime suspect who had valuable information et cetera. He talked, they always do. But what he said could not be verified. Also, his language was garbled. In the end the valuable information et cetera was lost because the subject died.

  A disappointment all around, Thomas said.

  A mighty disappointment, Russ agreed.

  All that work wasted.

  Well, Russ said, they got him off the streets. That's something, I suppose. He was an awful son of a bitch.

  Funny thing, once or twice I thought I felt Florette in the room.

  Yes, Russ said, I know what you mean.

  Listening quietly, Thomas said.

  Bernhard was doing the interrogating?

  No, Thomas said. A Frenchman named Antoine.

  I met Antoine once, Russ said. He went on to describe Antoine as a younger man, new to the security trade but already a natural. Thomas watched a bus lumber into the parking lot, stop, and discharge its cargo, schoolchildren from Lille. The children looked to be ten or twelve years old, milling around the bus until two teachers alighted and they all moved off up the gravel path to the monument. The children were subdued, no doubt the result of the lecture en route from Lille. This is hallowed ground. Many thousands died here. Be respectful. No skylarking. The children and their teachers strolled up the path, the colors of their winter clothing bright against the monotone of the field.

  And what do you think of Bernhard's move?

  What move is that? Thomas asked.

  He said he told you last night. But he also said you looked a little out of it and may not have understood. He's resigned from the government. He's been asked to become managing director of Edwards. Edwards et Cie., Edwards Ltd., Edwards Inc., depending on the country. It's the security firm, the one that's filled with ex–Special Forces, ex-SAS, ex–Foreign Legion, ex-Wehrmacht, ex-cops, ex-Chicago goons, Los Angeles shamuses. You name it. They've got the firepower of an army but none of them know how to run a business. They can overthrow a government but they can't read a balance sheet. They have to have someone who understands the ins and outs of the peculiar business they're in and the even more peculiar people they employ. So they found Bernhard.

  Bernhard doesn't know anything about running a business.

  He says he does.

  Thomas began to laugh. Bernhard Sindelar, CEO. Is that it?

  That's it. Bernhard says everyone needs a fresh challenge after the age of sixty-five. This is his fresh challenge. They're paying him a ton of money plus stock and stock options and a fat expense account and a car and driver. And he doesn't have to move to the Cayman Islands, where the company is chartered. And he wants me to come aboard as vice president in charge of expenses because he needs a man he can trust, someone who wasn't born yesterday. All those warriors seem to think that money grows on trees. I'll be there to tell them it doesn't.

  Are you going to do it?

  I was, until all this.

  Don't make a decision. Wait a little.

  I suppose I will. Probably I ought to retire.

  Let things settle, Thomas said.

  You're awfully good to call, Tommy.

  Will you let me know if there's anything I can do?

  I'll see you when I get back.

  We'll go somewhere, Thomas said. We'll go to Baghdad. Give Bernhard a hand.

  Wouldn't that be something. There was a pause and Thomas heard shuffling sounds over the telephone, as if something were rubbing against the receiver. For a moment Thomas thought the connection was broken and then he knew that Russ was sobbing and gasping for air at the same time.

  Thomas said, It's going to be all right, Russ.

  He said, No, it isn't.

  Not right away, Thomas said.

  I don't know why they wouldn't let me bury her in LaBarre, Russ said. I don't understand why. There was another long pause and then Russ sighed, murmured goodbye, and rang off.

  Thomas got out of the car and stretched. He lit a Gitane and stood quietly smoking. The schoolchildren and their teachers were coming back down the path. He could hear high-pitched voices and laughter. They had not spent much time at the memorial. But probably they had an itinerary, La Boisselle, the Lochnagar Crater, the marshes at Frise, and the graveyards in between, all of Somme 1916 that could be crowded into one afternoon. Probably they would also be reading the books of Blaise Cendrars and Georges Duhamel, veterans both. The memorial at Thiepval was but one detour among many and at the end of the day the schoolchildren would be exhausted; their teachers, too. Not all of what they saw would stay with them. Surely the graveyards would, row upon row of stones, and so many nationalities. If they were considerate, the teachers would spare their students specific knowledge of the many ways the millions had died: gunshot, grenade, bomb, bayonet, poison gas, hand-to-hand combat. In the spring rains infantrymen sank into the mud and disappeared. Dysentery, pneumonia, gangrene, heart attack, and stroke, all were present. Nervous breakdown was epidemic. The Great War was a titanic struggle, a soul struggle, a struggle of civilizations, except it was the same civilization divided only by language and national custom. No one who lived through it returned from it entirely sane. No revenge was too harsh for the victors, no bitterness too deep for the defeated. The war glorified the values of the slaughterhouse. Nothing could justify it. Nothing would even the score, though a generation later the Germans would try. Hard to say what the schoolchildren would remember of their tour of Somme 1916.

  Thomas pitched the Gitane onto the concrete and watched sparks fly. The school bus pulled slowly out of the parking lot; the children gave him a wave and he waved back. He had never heard a voice as broken as Russ's voice, a voice as toneless as modern music. It was without color. All he wanted for his daughter was that she be buried at LaBarre, an inland place where she knew no one. Probably he thought she would be safe there from the forces that had taken her life. Russ would be remembering his own benign childhood and somewhere that childhood existed still. Whatever LaBarre had become, something of what it had been remained. No doubt that was the point. His own birthplace, his daughter's grave. Soon enough he would join her, and that was the meaning of LaBarre. So he would plead with his older daughter and the other family members and be turned down. They would look at him as though he were crazy, a man maddened by grief. Whatever was he thinking of? Russ had lived too long abroad, outside the family orbit. LaBarre meant nothing to his older daughter or to Grace's friends or Grace herself. LaBarre was personal to Russ.

  Billie Holiday

  IN EARLY FEBRUARY another false spring came to St. Michel du Valcabrère. Monsieur Bardèche arranged metal tables and chairs on the sidewalk and everyone came in the afternoon to enjoy the sun and temperatures that reached almost 15°C, knowing that in a few days the thermometer would fall and freezing rain or snow would follow. But the false spring lasted for a week, the entire village giddy with the excitement of it. The days were longer, too, and soon the café was filled from lunchtime on wi
th people in shirtsleeves, their faces upturned toward the sun. Thomas had walked into the village to collect his mail, then walked to the café in the square for a glass of something while he opened letters. That day there were three from Russ, long letters painfully composed on a vintage typewriter with a faded ribbon and an a that jumped right. He confided that he was not in a good way, sleeping poorly and drinking too much, at loose ends and quarreling with his surviving daughter. Here he was in the strange position of blaming himself for Grace's death and having his Caitlin enthusiastically concur. She wrote that the time had come for him to take stock, examine the damage he had done. He was a bastard and had always been a bastard, fundamentally unfaithful, unstable, erratic, and selfish, more concerned with his disgusting work than with his family. He had never been there for them. What does that mean, Thomas? "Never been there for them." I was always there for them, except when I wasn't. When I was on the job earning the money that kept them afloat. His blame of himself was easier to take than his daughter's blame of him, which must mean that his feelings of self-blame were false or at least not thoroughly thought through.

  If Sandra were still alive she'd set things straight. The girls always listened to their mother.

  Russ wanted absolution but Caitlin wasn't giving any. Caitlin refused to communicate except by e-mail, her messages written in a tumbling stream of consciousness that became ever more strident until she was nearly incoherent with anger. E-mail encouraged that sort of thing, picking thoughts off the top of your head like popcorn from a box and flinging them into the ether of the universe without benefit of mature reflection, meaning the anguish they might cause the recipient, and all the time calling it candor-for-your-own-good.

  For all that, Russ said he was enjoying himself in New York. Most days he went to the Met, the Morgan Library, or the Frick and lunched at his club. There was always someone he knew in the bar, retired men or men at loose ends like himself. Every Saturday morning he went to visit Grace's grave in Queens and that gave him some solace. He was upset that she was not resting in LaBarre but he had come to terms with that. Maybe it was for the best. Something forlorn about the grave, though, the earth still bare and the gravestone yet to arrive. She had been dead such a short time and it felt like forever. Thomas looked up from the letter, realizing he had not visited Florette's grave since he had been back, not once. Until lately the weather had been wretched, but that was no excuse and not even much of an explanation. The truth was, he had visited Florette only three or four times—no, three—since her death in November. On his way home, he thought, he would stop by. And do what? Pay his respects? He did not want to think of Florette in the ground but somewhere in the air, one of the spirits that hovered about, enjoying the sunshine of the false spring. Thomas turned back to Russ's letter.

  In any case, Russ wrote, New York day to day had much to recommend it. The people were brusque but that was because there were so many of them on one small island. Sharp elbows were obligatory, and so the city was off-putting if you were used to the more relaxed European environment. And the noise! But you got used to that, too, and when you wanted entertainment every movie you ever heard of was playing somewhere in the city or on cable—music, too. His apartment downtown was comfortable, though the neighborhood was somber. He was living only a few blocks from the former World Trade Center. Russ did not think he would be returning to Paris. Maybe he had run out his string in Paris. That happened with cities; suddenly you were no longer comfortable in them and had to go elsewhere. Russ offered his apartment to Thomas any time he wanted to use it. He disclosed that his contract with the Agency had expired. They had proposed a one-year renewal, part-time work, but he figured that his string had run out there, too. Isn't it hard at our age to get the hang of new systems and the personalities that went with them? Bernhard said he saw you in Le Havre but provided no details. I did not mention that we had spoken. I told him nothing of your thoughts on the matter. Wasn't it true that Bernhard was sometimes careless with personal information? Russ closed—Thomas could sense his shyness in the roundabout way he put it—with the news that he had begun to write again, a very long story that had possibilities. He was working in the early morning as he had done in the old days, when he was much younger and had energy and ideas to burn. At five A.M. the city that never slept was asleep, and if you were awake you were comfortably alone and could go about your business unimpeded.

  That was letter number one. Letter number two was the same letter in different words, somewhat more cheerful. A new deli had opened in the neighborhood, his long story was going well, he had one more or less successful conversation with Caitlin, and he had met a merry widow who had a place up in Washington, Connecticut, so his weekends were occupied. The third letter was a reprise of the other two, with a final paragraph on the activities of Bernhard Sindelar. Bernhard had found Edwards in terrible financial shape and was putting the books in order and establishing a budget. Bernhard wanted Russ to join up as comptroller of the company, essentially the wallah in charge of expenses. But Russ thought not. He liked working on his story. He enjoyed his Connecticut weekends with the merry widow. Bernhard sounded as though he were having a fine time inspecting the books and visiting the company's many foreign outposts, Iraq and Afghanistan and West Africa and unnamed East Asian nations, all of them beleaguered and in need of professional threat-assessment. Each week new clients showed up, Russian industrialists and Latin American supremos and, just the other day, a worried American board chairman. The chairman wanted competent bodyguards but he didn't want gorillas, so Bernhard said he could find two out of the pages of Gentlemen's Quarterly but the chairman would have to ante up for the Armani suits, Bruno Magli shoes, and Blancpain wristwatches, along with fresh haircuts.

  Thomas put the letters aside and ordered an espresso and a glass of beer. He glanced at the front page of the American newspaper but there was nothing new or interesting. Nothing that wouldn't keep until dinner. The air was balmy, the sun warm on his face. Around him the townspeople were sunning themselves, sleepy in the afternoon, as if there were no other place to go and nothing in particular to do. The moment was sufficient unto itself.

  Old Bardèche brought his order and said someone had been asking for him.

  Who was that?

  American woman, Bardèche said. Unpleasant woman, middle-aged, expensively dressed. She said she saw no lights in your house and wanted to know if you'd gone away. I told her I didn't know that you'd gone and didn't know when you'd be back. I don't think she believed me. Were you gone?

  I was in Le Havre last week.

  Bardèche said, She looked at me wrongly, as if I knew where you were and wouldn't say.

  If she comes back, tell her I'm still away.

  I will be happy to. I didn't like her.

  Thanks for telling me.

  I thought you should know, Bardèche said.

  Thomas said, I'll have your portrait before long.

  The Frenchman broke into a wide grin. I am eager to see it.

  Next week, Thomas said.

  You have worked on it a long time.

  It's always the way with interesting subjects, Thomas said. He looked around and saw that most everyone had left the café, leaving the sun unattended.

  Did you walk from your house?

  Thomas nodded.

  I thought so. You should leave at once. A storm is coming from the west. Bardèche pointed over the roof of the church where the first black clouds were visible. And then Thomas felt a cool breeze.

  I can get someone to drive you.

  No, I'll walk.

  You should leave now. It's not far, Thomas said.

  He paid and they shook hands. He stuffed the letters and the newspaper into his jacket pocket, picked up his walking stick, and began the two-mile trek to his house. The air had an electrical odor but underneath it was the unsettling smell of spring lilacs. He was thinking about Russ and wondering whether to write him about his vision in Le Havre: Russ alone in
a hotel room eating a room-service meal and watching television news and the strange intimation that he was not alone but accompanied, someone out of the frame of Thomas's vision; and then Thomas knew he had composed a portrait, the other party felt but not seen. But there was no need to trouble Russ with visions. It was good that he was writing again. He had not published anything for thirty years. He said that his secret life kept intruding. He loved the camaraderie of the secret world, really a tremendous esprit in the clandestine service, more esprit than there ever was at home. Esprit was not one of the things Sandra was good at. They drifted apart and came together again after her illness. She had tremendous courage. He abandoned the field and took a liaison job in New York so he could look after her, and he wondered later if their tenderness toward each other then distanced them from their daughters. He wondered if in the last months they lived in a locked room.

  When Sandra died he went abroad again because secret work was the only work he knew how to do. Other jobs came along but he always turned them down. Mostly they were offers from private companies that wished to capitalize on his special knowledge, which he believed belonged to the government. In that sense he was not entirely his own man and so his thoughts often returned to his early efforts at fiction. They were stories set in LaBarre, tales of smalltown life always narrated by the same character, a middle-aged doctor who knew too many secrets for his own good. The secrets weighed on him but exhilarated him also. They gave him a kind of power in the community and so he was feared. The stories usually opened in the doctor's waiting room, an ambiance that reminded Thomas of his father's, the shabby furniture and out-of-date magazines. When Thomas asked Russ once if he thought he could make a living writing fiction, he said instantly, No. It's an avocation, that's all. But I loved doing it. I didn't need an audience.