The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

by Tom Rachman

  Tooly slid the glasses back onto Sarah’s face, and the older woman hugged her, quite unexpectedly. “I need a cigarette to celebrate your arrival,” she declared. “Keep me company.” Her bedroom was the only area in the apartment where she was allowed to light up, so she lay on the bed propped up with pillows, kicked off her sandals, painted toenails stretching, crystal ashtray on her belly. She tossed over a loose cigarette, but Tooly didn’t smoke anymore. Sarah tried to cajole her into resuming, to no avail. Once, Sarah’s white-green packets of Kool Super Longs had seemed the paragon of elegance, but her draws were urgent and coarse now. “In the winter out here, you sleep late and watch a bit of TV, and, next thing you know, it’s dark,” she said. “Much better now, with the daylight back. Hey, let’s go out. I can show you the town before lunch. I just need to change.”

  “Can’t you go as you are?”

  “Not with my glasses on!”

  “Come on—wear them.”

  The background whisper of waves increased as they strode down Via Gramsci heading for the sea. A motor scooter droned past, two teenage boys in beetle helmets with unclipped straps fluttering, the portly driver shouting at his passenger above the engine buzz. Tooly looked toward Sarah but found only empty space, turning to discover her several steps behind, limping hurriedly to keep up. “You go so fast!”

  “Sorry, sorry,” Tooly said. “It’s habit. Throw a coin at me if I do that.”

  “I absolutely will. Look, there’s another,” she said, stooping to collect more change off the ground. This was Sarah’s pastime, developed in recent winters here: an urban treasure hunt for coins that people had dropped on the sidewalk. “If I don’t reach fifty euros for the month, I become quite agitated,” she joked. “Keep your eyes open around parking meters especially.” She squinted at the pavement, having left her glasses at home.

  At the dock, the jetties sat empty, the fishing trawlers out for the day. Waterside restaurants were prepped, awaiting fresh seafood. The footpath curled an upward course toward a cliff edge at which stood an ancient Roman villa, its crumbled rooms carpeted by grass.

  “Nero and Caligula were born in Anzio,” Sarah noted.

  “Nice pedigree.”

  Sarah pointed across the cliff at the sea. “And that’s where the Allied landing took place in World War Two—thousands of young men killed right here. In 1944, all that blue sea was gray with landing craft. Beautiful young men stuck in the holds. Lots of them with just minutes left to live.”

  Paul’s father had been wounded at Anzio, Tooly remembered. “Do lots of tourists come pay tribute?”

  “To be honest, there’s not much to show that it even happened. Now and then, they find machine guns underwater. There’s a couple of military cemeteries and a museum with dusty old uniforms and a few sad letters home. But the reason people come to Anzio these days is to swim and tan,” she said. “Oh—do you feel that? It’s going to rain. My hip feels funny, which means rain. There’s a reason to crash your car!”

  “A built-in barometer.”

  She gripped Tooly’s forearm affectionately.

  In the kitchen, Sarah fetched napkins and checked recipes, tapping her lower lip.

  “I do that,” Tooly said.

  “Do what?”

  “Tap my lip like you were doing.”

  “Do I? You’re copying me,” Sarah said, eyeglasses back on her nose, finger running down the cookbook page. “Now leave me to put on the finishing touches.”

  Tooly waited in the living room, hearing the clack of knife on cutting board, a pan sizzling, faucet running. She glanced into the kitchen, intending to offer help, but saw Sarah inadvertently knock loose an implant of upper teeth as she tasted sauce on a wooden spoon. Tooly pretended not to be there and waited on the terrace.

  They ate blini canapés with salmon roe on sour cream to start, then frittura di paranza with lemon quarters, and pan-fried sole with potato salad. Approval produced such joy in Sarah that Tooly found herself offering it more heartily than merited. Sarah was on a high, swollen by Tooly’s enthusiasm—until the dessert, a rum baba that failed to rise properly. This was a special visit, she said disconsolately, and now everything was ruined. She knew that to be irrational and admitted it. But the intractable lifelong argument between what Sarah knew and what Sarah felt drove her to the cigarette pack. Dejectedly, she lit up in the kitchen, mindless of house rules now.

  “What do you do out here?” Tooly asked. “I mean, day to day.”

  “Whatever I want. Watch TV. Go grocery shopping. Keep the apartment clean. We get these rains, being near the water, and if I don’t clear all the leaves they block the drain, and the terrace floods. So I take care of that. What else? I have my treasure hunt.”

  “The neighbors? Who are they?”

  “No idea. I’m invisible. You pass a certain age as a woman, and nobody sees you anymore.”

  “Course they do.”

  “You’ll find out; you’ll become a ghost one day. Though it’s not all bad. You get to watch things happening: men and women appraising each other. I can just look, and not have to deal with the sex anymore. Men are never that clean, are they, and they’re hairy and sweaty. Sex isn’t ever that pleasurable for women—really, it’s just the pleasure of being wanted.”

  “Not sure I agree with any of that.”

  “Men are hairy.”

  “Yes, that part is true,” Tooly conceded. “Not necessarily a bad thing. Within limits.”

  “The right amount in the right places.”

  “Well, yes. True of everything.”

  “What strikes me,” Sarah continued, “is that men are such savages—they don’t fold their clothes, they pee on the toilet seat, they barely wash—yet when it comes to their views on women they’re suddenly so concerned about how everything looks. Each barbarian becomes an aesthete about the female body, all of a sudden expecting perfection.”

  “Lots of the men I’ve encountered seem pretty grateful to settle for what they get. Though maybe that’s the ones who go for me—not, perhaps, the most discriminating category.”

  “Don’t undersell yourself, Tooly. What you present is what the man buys.”

  “Honesty in advertising. That’s what I offer.”

  “What’s weirder still,” Sarah continued, “is how women are the opposite: we’re tidy and neat; we respect decoration; we groom; we use fabric softener, put rinse-aid in the dishwasher, feather our nests. Then we share those nests with some stinking bird who’s the opposite.”

  “I don’t use fabric softener, and I don’t actually know what rinse-aid is. Then again, I also don’t have a hairy man in my house.”

  “That’s probably why.”

  “Because I don’t use fabric softener? God, imagine if you’re right. And men can be nice-looking,” she added, voice fading as Sarah resumed.

  “Around here, I could vanish and no one would notice. I will vanish next weekend. That’s when the owners get back, and I run away like a dormouse.” She was headed north next, to an out-of-season ski lodge in Alto Adige, near the Austrian border.

  This was how Sarah survived nowadays, house-sitting empty vacation homes, residing in the right places at the wrong times: a ski resort when the slopes were muddy; a beach house when it rained on the sea. “I feed cats sometimes and water plants. It’s not bad. Sometimes they give me spending money.” The owners were wealthy men for whom she had once been the other woman. They offered charity now, and she lived at the whims of pity. If their plans changed—a forecast turned splendid for the weekend, say—she had to go.

  Sarah scooped grounds into the moka coffeemaker. “You know, I wondered about you,” she said, back turned, reaching into the cupboard, clattering through crockery for espresso cups.

  “Wondered?”

  “I mean, what happened to you?” she said. “Where did you go? You cheap runaway—not even caring about those who brought you up with blood, sweat, and tears.” Sarah was a person who got the tone all wrong, w
ho stood at the threshold of a subject, pretending a lack of interest, then barged in. “I suppose you’re so very angry at me.”

  “I’m not angry.”

  Sarah shooed away this denial. “And you’re not well,” she said. “You’re clearly not.”

  “What do you mean? I’m fine.”

  “You look sickly. You look ill. Like you’re starving away.”

  “You’re starting to sound like you were my mother.”

  “Such a hurtful thing to say.”

  They stood there, gazing at the bubbling espresso pot.

  “You asked how I spend my time here,” Sarah resumed. “One thing I was embarrassed to say is church. Don’t worry—I don’t try to foist it on people. Just something for me. But I find it comforting. And interesting. A different way of seeing what happened. A way to forgive myself.”

  “You blame yourself for things?”

  “Of course.”

  “Such as?”

  Sarah poured the coffee. “Sugar?”

  Tooly saw the sugar bowl in Sheepshead Bay, crawling with ants. “What do you regret?”

  “But are you staying overnight? You didn’t pick a room yet.”

  “I have that hotel booked in Rome,” Tooly repeated, clearing dishes to hide her irritation.

  “Don’t bother with the plates. Just leave them, if you so desperately want to get away from me.”

  “I like doing dishes. It’s a weirdness of me, one of many. Everywhere I go, I insist on doing the washing-up.” Despite her outward cheer, Tooly bridled at the familiar rigmarole of Sarah. Years of being plunged into unease, years of trying to coax her out of moods. “I was thinking of those stories you used to tell me,” Tooly said, and heard herself appeasing again. “About those animals when you were growing up in Kenya. Must’ve been quite a childhood, out there in the wild.”

  “Wasn’t that wild.”

  “I imagine leopards leaping out whenever you left the house.”

  “We had a garden like everybody else. Could’ve been anywhere.”

  “People say if you’re born in Africa you have the place in your veins forever.”

  “I don’t say it.”

  “Italy’s more like home now?”

  “How could it be?”

  “Would you ever go back to live in Kenya?”

  “I left for a reason. It was small-minded and remote. White Africans talk interminably about how gorgeous it is—the land, the land, the land. Bores me to tears. Kenya does have proper countryside; all other landscapes look wrong when I see them—overgroomed and hacked up. But why would I go somewhere just to look at land?”

  “You’ve not got relations left there?”

  “None I’d want to know. And Mummy and Daddy are long dead.”

  “I don’t remember you visiting them.”

  “Why would I? They were otherwise occupied.”

  “How so?”

  “Sipping,” she responded. “My mother drank to get unhappy. Daddy just soaked.”

  Tooly had heard these tales of woe before. Perhaps she should have sat through them all again. But she just couldn’t. “Sarah, I came here to talk to you.”

  “Which is what we’re doing.”

  “I need to ask you some questions.”

  “How dramatic.”

  “About Humphrey first.”

  “The old darling!”

  “Sarah, where’s he from? Somewhere in Russia, right?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Well,” Tooly responded, “I’ve seen him recently. You know his accent? It’s gone. Can you explain that?”

  “Don’t know what you mean.”

  “He talks like an English speaker now. It’s like hearing someone completely different. Not completely,” she corrected herself. “The voice is the same. It still seems like him.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Why would I invent that, Sarah? What possible reason? I came here for help in figuring things out. Stuff that you know. Stuff that pertains to my life.”

  “What on earth could you mean?”

  “Tell me about Venn, then. Where did he go?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “What else could it mean?” She looked up at the ceiling. “I find it disappointing—extremely, extremely—that you won’t ever be direct with me.”

  “I’m the most direct person in the world,” Sarah responded with astonishment.

  “Then please try, right now.”

  Over the next two hours, Tooly peppered her with questions. Sarah had been there. Could she not just explain? Rather than doing so, she spun interminable yarns, depicting herself as innocent and kind while flinging blame on everyone else—above all Venn, whom she depicted as the improbable devil in her tale, with Humphrey as the saint.

  “That’s not what happened,” Tooly interrupted. “Do you honestly believe what you’re saying?”

  Sarah lit a cigarette, flapping at the air to clear the smell. “You know what we should do after you go back to your shop?” she said brightly. “We should try Skype together. No one ever agrees to do it with me. I’ll show you how tomorrow.”

  This visit had been folly. Another round of make-believe with Sarah.

  “I’m not here tomorrow. I’ve made that clear.”

  “You’re being silly—so much I can tell you still.”

  “Right now, then. Just one thing.”

  “Well,” Sarah said, “you have to ask me a question. Or how else am I supposed to—”

  “I’ve done nothing but ask questions for the past two hours!”

  “You want to go over Bangkok again? Reminisce about the good times with Paul?” She mimicked him: “ ‘Careful now! Shush, or you’ll scare away the birds!’ ”

  “Don’t do that. Don’t. Okay?”

  Sarah sighed, eyelashes fluttering. “Well, I suppose we were a bit rough on dear old Paulie. Both of us were,” she said. “Still, a little hard to discuss Bangkok if I can’t mention him.”

  “Fine. Tell me about New York, then.”

  “Well,” Sarah answered, “quite devotedly of me, I traveled to that hovel you and Humph were sharing in Brooklyn, all just to see you. I came offering a job for you here in Italy, as you may recall. But you refused to hear me out. Sent me away in the most spiteful fashion.”

  “Be serious. You came to see Venn, not me.”

  “I was there to protect you,” Sarah protested. “I knew things were going wrong.”

  “Not this again.”

  “If I was there purely for Venn, why did I never see him on that trip?”

  “Because he wouldn’t see you.”

  “Did you ever ask yourself why?”

  “I know why—because you were unbearable to be with.”

  Surprisingly, Sarah failed to retaliate—no hissing fury, no venom. “Each time I turned up,” she responded sadly, “wherever it was in the world, he always met with me. But not that time. I wasn’t worth much anymore, I suppose.”

  “You’re the only one who thinks in terms like that,” Tooly said. “And don’t claim you were so very concerned about my well-being. I shudder to imagine what would’ve happened if Venn hadn’t been around when I was growing up. You, disappearing every other day for some personal freak-out, or whatever those were. You weren’t looking after me. He was.” That bank card, a reminder of their bond, in her pocket everywhere she’d traveled alone. “Has he not been in touch at all?”

  “Let’s get back to Humphrey. How is he?”

  “I told you, he talks completely differently. There’s clearly something I don’t know here. And I think you do.”

  “All I know is that Humphrey was the great friend of your childhood. An utter darling!”

  “Can you answer my question, please?”

  “You should thank me for Humph. I always made sure he kept you company.”

  “Kept me company? Humphrey had nowhere else to go. I kept him company, if anything. He was a hanger-on.”
She thought of his reading material, little snacks on the Ping-Pong table. “Maybe that’s not the right word, but I—”

  “Very fond of you, Humphrey was,” Sarah said. “He and I tried everything to help you. Even in New York, we tried. But you wouldn’t come with me. You wanted things a certain way, and there was no shifting you. Just like always. Just like it was you who decided how things ended up with Paulie.”

  “We’re not discussing him,” Tooly reiterated. “Can we stick to the topic?”

  “Oh, I’m sure Humphrey told you everything already.”

  “He told me nothing; that’s why I came here.”

  “And how nice that you did! Having such a lovely time, Matilda.”

  “I’m not. You might be. I’m not.”

  “Give some thought to dinner. That restaurant is supposed to be fab.”

  “This is absurd.” Tooly stood and fetched her bag. “I’m going back.”

  “I’ll try not to look too gloomy,” Sarah responded. “If I frown too much, I could get wrinkles one day. Keep your face in a state of permanent immobility—that’s my advice. I try not to have any expression whatsoever. Which is easier when you’re on your own.”

  Tooly boarded the next express for Rome. In the carriage, a group of ratty teenagers played music from a cellphone; a man clipped his fingernails. As the train prepared to depart, she glimpsed a fiftyish woman hobbling along the platform. It was Sarah, in fresh makeup, scrutinizing each window in turn, hoping to be spotted, and that her guest might rethink. She paused at Tooly’s window. But without glasses she saw nothing, and continued past.

  The train chugged into a pelting rainstorm, its hydraulic doors sighing open at each shabby station on the Roman periphery. Tooly repeated to herself that she’d been right to leave. Nothing to learn from Sarah, nothing owed to her. Yet the image remained: Sarah looking blindly at her. She’d be returning to the apartment now, probably soaked from the downpour, flicking on lights in the spare bedrooms, plumping the cushion on the kitchen chair, still indented from her departed guest.