Or, like last week, appear one morning in the rear slop yard of an Embassy which hadn’t bothered to plant anything there—fourteen people matted together in sleep, or in the copulations which produced the round-headed babies lying everywhere among them—all with the diseases or hidden starvations that linked them bone to bone. That first morning, seen from the Embassy’s back windows, as the sun glinted on an exposed cheek or bodice or the white sole of a child’s foot, a chicken-chatter of wakefulness ran through the pile of them. “A heap of people, I’ve never seen one,” a staff girl said, and fainted; then the mound down there gurgled and opened, maggoty face after face, saw the Embassy people staring from the office above and folded again, inching over each other but still moving—a mass of night soil for which there was no pipe. They had stayed on for days; a democratic ambassador could take no cognizance.
A few of the office girls, led by the one who’d fainted, began leaving the people-in-the-back their own lunchtime sandwiches of bologna or peanut butter bought at the PX market, where they were allowed to buy supplies along with the military. The courtyard people ate what they understood to be food, but left the rest. Their own leavings, of scavenged parings and rice thrown out by restaurants, grew ever larger; their garbage-hungers required refuse by the bale.
Then the rats came; maybe a baby was taken. One evening, in the dusk of the rainy season, their shusha-shusha rose more excitedly to the typewriters clattering up above. In a fog hung with neon, they were humping themselves together again, consolidating around some province they had lost. Again the whole office went to the windows to watch. Slaglike, they moved on, and out. Next morning, an Embassy aide was sent to order plantings; it was known that these people never disturbed gardens. Just to be sure, the aide, a smart cookie with a will to do for ambassadors what they couldn’t on their own, chose a cactus furred with a delicate web which entered the skin like nettles—and the Embassy’s slop yard was at last sown.
“Greetings, Mr. Wert.” Rony came forward one toro step.
The girl between him and Fernando nickered in Spanish, spit flecking from her.
“Yeah, we know—” a young voice said, in sandy American. “You’ll convey it to the proper authorities. And we’re not that.” The voice detached itself to one side; it came from a slim-headed American girl with one of those cowlick haircuts. Pretty enough. The collegiate ethic she took to be international shone from her. All the way from home. “Are we, Mr. William Wert.” She raised an arm, and made an impish salute. With a hand, foolish girl, which held a roundish object negligently. He had time to see her gold wrist-bangle gleam, and to hear that she couldn’t quite pronounce her r’s.
Then the Embassy’s armed soldier wilting at the doorway shouted, “She’s got a grenade!”—raised his rifle and all but fired it.
Maybe the heat made the recruit slow. Certainly he was a green one. Wert knocked the gun up in time. Perhaps her saying William had helped.
He went down the steps to her. Shaken, she turned up her palm to him. “It’s only an atis,” she said in her stubbly home-burr, “that’s all it was,” and covered her mouth as if she saw the state of the world for the first time. “I know,” Wert had said tenderly. Raising his head, he saw that the picket line was taking this as personally as he was. Grinning, blushing even, they were already making the proper poems. Taking the roundish object from the girl, he went back up the steps to the soldier. “Go inside,” he said between his teeth. “But slowly. Like you’re going to lunch. Get your ass out of here; I don’t care what your duty-hours are.” He turned the atis in his hand. “You trigger-happy fool, this is a custard-apple.” The guard went off whining how was he to know—? The stuff these spicks ate, he’d said. True, the thing did look exactly like a grenade. If the shot had been fired, would Wert have had to blame this damned country? It was their fruit.
But when he took a good look at her, he began to shake, and his eyes cleared. That night, after pancakes and tea, a walk clear across town, a jitney ride to the Chinese section and a dinner there, he took her to the cathedral. In its depths the squatters were already bedded down. A tiny radio squealed red-eyed. A priest came forward out of the shadows. “They spray for lice,” Wert whispered to her, but the priest wasn’t doing that. Walking past Wert and the girl with quiet, tranced eyes, he went to the squatters’ corner, made the sign of the cross over them and himself and hung a lamp for them.
“How there are friends—” Jenny whispered, “everywhere.” When she thanked Wert for saving her life he let her know how she’d saved his. So that he could still go on with his job in some dignity—a trigger-happy fool stopped short of the shameful, just in time.
He raised his head at that. The echoes in flats like these were thin but still serviceable. The story he’d elected to tell himself was a true love story. The lovers had saved each other in the end. She—to be spared for Venice. He—to be spared for this. Balooch. Ba-a-looch.
He was being brought nearer and nearer his wife by those two Iranians, but why? Were they repeating to him, as if there was some vampire-chance of resurrecting Jenny even yet—“They never really bury in Venice”? Or reminding him—Buried, maybe only in quicksand. But long ago.
He got up and put his arms around the tree that had been planted in his house. Holding its blossom-scent and prickle, cradling deep in boughy arms that bent for him, was like holding a woman whose name he didn’t yet know. But there was no use turning out the lights.
II.
ON A FREEZING SUNDAY in New York some weeks later, he left the hotel in the East Thirties which for years had maintained an abiding home for him in the form of a hamper of two suits of different weights, two pairs of shoes, a raincoat, a dinner jacket and a small monthly storage bill inscribed, “Your pied-à-terre in New York”—and set out for Queens in his rented car. The car had the heady vinyl smell which nowadays came with so much that was brand-new; its seat belt yawped at him like a jailor until he locked himself in. He was home. On the seat beside him, wrapped by Fortnum’s with the nanny care that sent biscuits unbroken round the world, was an unwieldy package containing an assortment of their finest, centered around one modest gift to be made at the true and highest Meshed level of eternal friendship—his own great-grand-uncle the brigadier general’s silver collapsible traveling cup. All of this packed together in one very large pot of interesting design. “Can’t afford to insure that, I’m afraid, sir,” the tail-coated clerk said, admiring it. “That’s all right,” Wert said. “Neither can I.”
He’d ended up buying a seat for the package in the plane to Washington, where it rode belted in like a passenger and spoken to coyly by the stewardess, after she’d finally agreed to allow it there. “Your wife’s not on the plane, sir?” He’d shaken his head, staring moodily at his package. “For the wedding of our very best friend. Friends.” He patted it. “Sorry your wife’s ill, sir.” The stewardess was sympathetically older than average; the airlines were permitting that. “The baby,” Wert said. When she passed by again, she reached down and straightened his companion’s seat belt. “Austrian wine cooler,” he said. “Break like crazy. Can’t think why they wanted it; they’ve been living together for years.”
Though he’d never had need of the fantasy life, he’d rather enjoyed being cast into the expected social frame. He had a lot of random experience and information going to waste. No trouble for instance, to find a home for that plant; he’d taken it at once to a dead colleague’s widowed mother, who still lived near Blenheim Park, in the glass-roofed atrium her husband had built for them out of complete disregard for the climate and an equal regard for an ancestor who had been the King’s astronomer. She had converted the house to a conservatory, planted its ground to tree nurseries and now lived in a hut at the bottom of her topiary garden. Where, when she and he stood there by moonlight—in the midst of a grass-and-pebble chessboard on which the thirty-two tree-chessmen whose queen skirts and turreted hats she herself had clipped loomed like adversaries about to mo
ve—she’d sighed, “To think that I once collected Belleek!”
From her dead son, who’d sighed over that, too, Wert knew what that was. What did most people do with the odd knowledge and peculiar people they collected throughout life? They passed these on to their children, who often couldn’t care less but in time couldn’t help being immersed in the fabric, too. “What’s Belleek?” one said importantly to one’s girls—“Why, according to an old friend, it’s an Irish china of creamy texture but nasty puffy shape—exactly like the Irish temperament.” Or to the boys on occasion, slowly and mysteriously, “Why that’s a job for the King’s astronomer.”
For of course one gave them one’s fantasy, as well. He could recall his own father doing this, though in the South of those days the whites more often relegated this duty to the blacks. Until Wert was ten, the cooks and gardeners of the town, the servants and the service people, had been his juvenile literature, a communal resource shared by all white children of his rank. And the blacks of those days, with more held-in fantasies than even their own children could support, had been glad of the chance.
So if now in his middle age he began to feel like some weighed-down collector whose bric-a-brac was turning to junk—was it only middle age? Or a profession where he remained a cultural tailor who never sent in the Sunday suit, a diplomate of the world’s health, who must never prescribe? Not to reach even the brightest conclusion—that was his job. But privately, he had accumulated some.
Would he and Jenny have had children after all? Did he want them now? Other people’s children were like other people’s art to him; he had never wanted to possess. It was his belief that in the abstract, men never wanted children, and women rarely. When convention didn’t force it, a dissolution of other needs or a generalized yearning did, or that great progenitor, accident—until they saw the child. Then of course, they wanted to do it again, for the drama it added to the most meager lives. Viewed even dispassionately, to put into the world something absolutely new, yet dragging in its train all the old mysteries, was a marvelous act. He could only hope he wasn’t going to do something silly with women, or even with boys, though he had no taste for them. Doing either because of his sudden rosy passion—to transmit.
“Is it a rose?” he’d said to the widow, after she and a helper had lifted its clay pot out of the larger one, so that she could see its drainage—which had been as should be. The lorry he’d borrowed from the Hartsdale pub had a brewer’s name on it. Wert wore a sharp cap to match, and felt the winds of Oxfordshire tanning his cheeks. “You look lively,” she commented. “No. Not a rose or a daisy either, you clot. Nearer some form of mountain laurel, I fancy. I shall have to look in the book. If it’s there.” It wasn’t. “Can’t be a rose,” he said, coloring, remembering his grasp of it. “No thorns.”
Well, perhaps after all some hybrid; was his friend a grower?
“Used to be one,” Wert said, digging in a toe. “Once owned some of the largest opium fields in Iran. Made his millions from them. But at eighty he got rid of them. And has given a great deal of money for a hospital.”
“Ah so,” she said without a blink. “Well, it’s not a poppy. By the way, the hut won’t take that other pot. The fancy one.”
“That’s all right. I only have it on loan.”
She stopped to detach the withered wreath which still clung to the plant’s trunk. “Why, these were tree-orchids—how prettily they’ve dried! I shall save them for my granddaughter, who’s thirteen. At that age they press them, you know. Only us old parties dig.” She got up heavily, dangling the circlet from a wrist whose withered state it matched. “These came with? How extraordinary. So an old party sent you all this, eh? Pity.” She gazed up at him with the sibyl bluntness of all good gardeners. “Well, I’ll board your plant treasure for you.”
“No, it’s yours.”
She gave that English snuffle-click old Bakhtiary must have heard in the Cotswolds eighty years ago, and bent over the plant again. “Ah, you Arab beauty, I’ll take you in.” She fondled the thick stem. “Our village inn won’t, you know. Take in Arabs. Nor my sister’s hotel in Bournemouth, either. They do crowd one you know, abominably.” She crooned over the plant, greedily. “But I’ll take you. However did you get here?”
“I imagine she came by hand,” Wert said—and drove the whole way back to London in astonishment. Uneasily, he rang Cicely, the barrister. They had a fine evening—though not on the rug.
In Washington two days later, he was having lunch at the Monocle with Nosworthy, in town on the same business—a departmental conference on the serious drop in quality of the new recruits. “We’re getting only the squares,” Nosy said. “White or black. Oh, the ones with good accents and maybe a little money behind them—we always got some. And the smart-aleck ones who want to be gentlemen. That’s all right in a foreign service. As long as there’s also a steady enough stream of men at the top with—not only brains, but you know. A fervor to—you know.”
“Sure,” Wert said. “Could you possibly mean—men like us?”
“Ah, come on.” Nosy glanced from one tight little table to another. The place was a congressional haunt rather than one of theirs, which was why Wert had chosen it. “It’s not the Viet war that pisses off the young anymore, by the way. That generation’s gone.”
“Where?” Wert said.
“Come on. Into the nation, that’s where. And doing very well…I went up to Harvard the other day. Two staff men we’d very much like to have. Collaborated on a position paper for us once. Smart as hell, one of them. The other not bad. Not your academic jerks, either. Smooth. Know what that smart-ass had the nerve to say to me? ‘Mister, when I want to have a hand in my country’s diplomacy, I’ll join a multinational corporation—where I can have some real clout.’…And his sidekick agreed with him.”
“Nosy—” Wert said, “you and Gail having more trouble in Jamaica?”
The answer was yes. They wouldn’t be able to hold onto the house they’d put all their hearts into, unless they wanted to retire to a state of siege, political and vandal. His wife was desperate. “She says she’s too old to rethink the world.”
“But that’s what old age is, isn’t it? When you can’t?”
Nosy was holding a cigar to his ear, rolling it between thumb and forefinger to hear any stale crackle. He still got them from Cuba. “You thinking much, these days?”
Wert took the offered cigar and lit it. “Multinationals? Bigger deeds, bigger words. When you and I came in, corruption used to be quainter though. More personal.”
“Gimme back that cigar.”
Wert was touched by the American shyness that could still hit a nail on the head with a joke.
“It appears I’m about to be tempted, Uncle. Not sure with what. Want to bet on it?”
As he told his story, beginning with the Garrick and including a good part of that evening’s reflections—leaving out only the tree’s effect on him, and maybe not quite—a pale, incredulous smile grew on Nosy’s face, but he would say nothing, only shaking his head until Wert had finished.
“I’m fascinated with Manoucher,” he said then. He made Wert repeat all the young man’s utterances he could remember. “I might turn up in Iran; you never know.” As to Manoucher’s inviting the Garrick’s manageress to the Dorchester, he’d guessed it almost before Wert said, “It’s even possible he asked her there only for the company. They like female company, you know. Men of the harem nations. For itself.” Nosworthy had once been in Turkey for a long while, and Morocco, too, though never Iran. “They like to be centered in it, that is; they’re not like us. We get a mortal lot of it—but that’s different.”
All Nosworthy’s conversational reactions were governed by what he could or couldn’t tell either his wife or the nation—which by now might be identical. Though he was very good about the old man, very polite about the wedding. “They’re not satyriasts; never think that. The dynasts mean so much to them.” At times he could be a very sma
rt man. “So you’re going to Queens the very day of the wedding; who suggested that?”
“The Bakhtiary women invited me for it. The wives.” When he’d called Manoucher’s home, three women had answered, apparently on three different extensions. A fourth phone, over which he’d heard younger giggles, was picked up afterward. “They’re going to hold a celebration throughout the day—I’m asked to early lunch. After the ceremony, which they’re going to see by hookup, they hope to talk to Iran.” Hesitated. “To the son I expect, Manoucher. And the—family. And maybe the girl.” He didn’t know the protocol. Or if there was one. Or whether they still honored it. “It’s all been arranged.”
“They must have rented satellite time.” Even Nosy was awed.
Wert’s conversation with the three women had been a kind of chorale, with each voice first identifying herself. “This is Soraya.” The young daughter-in-law, it must have been—Manoucher’s wife. “This is Fateh.” The old man’s second wife. And “This is Madame.” Meaning clearly the wife. “Only Fateh spoke in Farsi as well as English. Giggling all the way. She sounds a silly type.” The fourth extension’s giggles, Fateh’s young daughters, had quickly stopped. On command of Madame.
“What does Madame speak?”
“Swiss French; she lives in Vevey. A couple of times in English, though.” Stiltedly, but it might be only manner. Even the instrument, which vibrated when she spoke, seemed to know this was Madame.
“And the daughter-in-law? Manoucher’s new wife?”
“English, good as you or me.” In a dovelike, scarcely accented voice which Wert, brooding on its tone, could still hear. Resolute. Or some other old-fashioned word, or biblical one.
Nosy was delighted with Wert’s plans for the pot. But when Wert pressed him for an opinion on what the Bakhtiarys might be up to, he would give none. “Well, you’ll find out in a year, won’t you? Their plans for you, I mean. I agree they have some. As for why Manoucher’s in exile—” Nosy shrugged. “Maybe he’ll tell you that then, too. Maybe it’s even—something we ought to keep our eye on.” He rubbed his hands together. “All I know is—I wouldn’t mind having that young man in the Department.”
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