“What is happening to such people now?” Larry asks.
“They want full revenge,” Anzor returns, with a sort of satisfaction. He knows this is not the sort of sentiment his hosts will like. Then he shrugs, and adds, “Some of them have turned fanatical. Or are about to. What do you expect?”
“We do it every time,” Larry says, regaining his air of authority. He leans forward, and the gathering of his brow is assertive. “We repress them and then we’re surprised when they turn violent. Our politicians should read Foucault, he could have told them all about it.”
“We?” Anzor queries. “Actually, I don’t see what this has to do with your politicians.”
“Oh, believe me, I’m ashamed of the way we muscle our way around the world,” Sheila throws in eagerly. She’s back on certain ground, the moral high ground of proper guilt. “Ashamed. I mean, look at what’s happening in Kosovo. There we go again, sending in some big planes as if dropping big bombs from the air were going to solve anything. I mean, how crude can you get?”
Anzor looks at her with open incredulity. “Would you rather watch innocent people being slaughtered daily?” he asks, no longer bothering to sound polite. “Massacred? Put behind barbed wire? Maybe it doesn’t matter because many of them are Muslims?”
Sheila’s face crumples a little, as if she were a child being rebuked. “Oh no no,” she protests in confusion. “Of course not. It’s just that … intervention … I mean, bullying, pushing everyone around …” Anzor looks at her acidly.
“I appreciate what you’re saying.” Larry leans forward toward
Anzor, like a boxer rallying. “I can see your point of view. But what you must understand …” Anzor, at this phrase, turns toward Larry with an excessively calm expression and the slightest rise of his eyebrows; and Larry, in brief confusion, pauses and swerves to another tone. “You see, what I have come to understand is that American power is always dangerous. We have lots of it, and we like to flex our muscles. You know, we are still cowboys at heart.”
“Oh yeah, I’m aware of it even here,” Sheila picks up. “The way we have … infiltrated everything. The ads. The movies. We’re like some … Godzilla, walking over everything.”
“We don’t get a lot of American movies where I come from,” Anzor puts in, speaking in an informative tone. “But we do get a lot of dead bodies.”
Isabel looks at him, startled. He has never been so explicit, has never mentioned bodies.
Another silence falls upon the room, in which she sees Larry recede from his pugilistic forward lean, and back into the sofa and a more thoughtful posture. “I appreciate that your country’s situation is very … difficult,” he says, “but surely American intervention wouldn’t help.”
“No,” Anzor agrees. “I just mean that America doesn’t control the entire world. Whatever you may think.” His expression has become veiled in a way Isabel is beginning to recognize as camouflage for terrible anger.
“I always thought …” Sheila begins, and then looks a bit desperate. “I mean, if we could just have been smarter about it … If we could just have been … well, nicer to them.”
“Nicer to whom?” Anzor sounds as though he is merely asking for clarification.
“Oh, you know. Them. The Soviets. If our government didn’t go around saying those stupid things about the Evil Empire. I mean, how provocative can you get? And childish.”
“You wanted to be nicer to the Soviets?” Anzor asks, with a more candid incredulity. “You think that would have helped?”
“Well, you know, I study psychological dynamics,” Sheila explains eagerly, “and studies definitively show—I mean, really definitively—that if you treat people as if you expected the best from them—as if you trusted them—they’ll respond more trustingly. I don’t see why that shouldn’t apply to politicians too.”
“Politicians is not the word I’d use for those Soviet … gentlemen,” Anzor begins, and then—only Isabel sees this—makes a private, dismissive shrug, as if to say, I give up.
Sheila looks confused, and Larry puts his hand on hers to silence her. “You know, I think it’s time to have something to eat,” he says, resuming the jovial tone of a good host; and they transfer to the dining room, with its splendid long oak table. Everyone takes the opportunity to turn away from the subject. The elusive elephant in the room is successfully ignored; or perhaps has left altogether, as Sheila and Larry offer food and Hungarian anecdotes with equal generosity. To Isabel’s great relief, Anzor joins in, turning into a perfectly charming, jovial dinner companion.
On the way down in the elevator, however, he doesn’t say a word. Insofar as is possible in his light jacket, he hunkers down into the collar, as if it were a fur coat or a large woolen scarf. He opens the door for Isabel politely; and then, as they come out into the half-lit courtyard, he says, loudly enough so that she’s worried Sheila and Larry might still hear, “What utter … crap. What world are they living in, anyway?”
“Please,” she says, pointing her finger up toward a window. She thinks she sees their silhouettes through the semi-transparent curtains.
“And these are the rulers of the world. The master class.”
“Oh come on,” Isabel says. “They teach a few students about
abstruse theory. Or some self-betterment techniques for people who are … unhappy. I don’t think that qualifies them as the masters of the universe.” Her own annoyance is finally matching his.
“You don’t understand how the world works,” he says flatly. He’s walking at a deliberate distance from her, as if touching her might ignite him to open violence.
“You’re right, I probably don’t,” Isabel says. “But I understand that they mean well. That they’re my friends and … yes, good people. They actually wish the world were a better place. They hate the idea of power, didn’t you see that? They don’t want to
rule
over anyone. As you so quaintly put it.”
“They don’t have to
want
to,” Anzor says. “They just do. That’s why they can talk like that. As if the whole world were like them. As if they controlled everything. As if everyone were just reacting to their bloody … niceness. Or the lack of it. This bloody … moral imperialism.” He pauses for a moment; his breathing is agitated. “They have all the power in the world, that’s why they can pretend to hate power. Such nice people.” His sarcasm is acid. “It’s bloody faking, that’s what it is. Didn’t you see how … he … talked to me?”
“They seemed to be interested in what you had to say—”
“Seemed. Seemed. As long as I told them noble savage stories. ‘What you have to understand …’” He mimics Larry’s tone, accurately and furiously. “All we are allowed to have is great stories. People behaving like noble savages. Of suffering like savages. Great …
material
. Thinking, that’s for them. It’s they who understand the world.”
“Oh, Anzor …” she begins, and then stops. She looks at his hunched silhouette, his glowering eyes; she sees that he feels he’s been slighted, patronized, though she can’t grasp why. In all his vulnerability, he seems to her more powerful than her friends. Much more powerful. He’s fired with the injustices his people have
suffered and the justice of his cause; he can hold them moral hostage with surprising ease. But she doesn’t say any of this to him.
“Perhaps you took this remark too seriously,” she says instead.
His voice is cut through with acid. “So it means nothing, what they say? They don’t mean anything, they’re just talking? Is that what you mean?” He turns toward her angrily. “Because that’s exactly the problem!”
“I guess I have lower expectations of dinner-party conversations than you,” Isabel says.
“You don’t even expect people to be responsible for what they say,” he goes on, ignoring her attempt at conciliation. “Not even your intellectuals. They can say anything they want. Like children. Self-indulgent children. The best and the brightest, isn’t that what you call them?”
“Stop saying ‘you’,” she says in exasperation. “I’m not a representative of the country.”
“Well then, what do you want me to say?” Anzor asks. “At least you can stand up for … something. For your position.”
“I have no position,” she says quietly, feeling a kind of resignation. She thinks, I don’t. I was not meant for this. This is not the way I understand the world … She feels an obscure sense of bad faith. Is this willful ignorance, willful innocence … Perhaps Larry is right about her; perhaps everyone is right.
Anzor grips her by the shoulders roughly, and turns her round, so that she faces him. “Don’t,” he says through tightened lips, his eyes hooded—“At least don’t patronize me.”
“What do you mean—” she begins.
“You don’t even have the respect to get angry at me,” he brings out. His grip remains tight. “To take me seriously.”
“I’m getting angry now,” she says and pulls away.
“That’s the problem with … all of you,” he says grimly. For the first time, she sees something hard in his face, some twist of his mouth that has cruelty in it. “You have all this power, and
you don’t care. You think if you say a few nice things over dinner … that reprieves you from everything. You’re without passions. How can you understand people who have them?!”
“You think I have no passions,” she says quietly.
He releases his grip, and hunches more deeply into his collar; then looks up. “No, not you,” he says, and his face clarifies, as if he were coming back to himself, out of some inner storm. “You know I don’t mean you.”
He takes her hand and lays it in his, to examine it wonderingly. She can feel his anger receding, being replaced by something else. He says, “You can summon … everything with this hand.”
She thinks that maybe now she is being patronized, and that perhaps she deserves it. No ideas but in music, that has been her credo. Insufficient, perhaps, to the world in which she finds herself. In which she never expected to find herself. But as he brings her hand up to his lips, as if it were a small living creature, as she feels the heat of contact and of his wanting her, she senses, again, his fleshly vulnerability and his breathing presence; and she responds with her own heat, her own need.
Prague
Prague, the burnished city, the throbbing site of still fresh History, the latest playing field of the international young. The human traffic on the Charles Bridge is in gridlock. She weaves her way laboriously among the squatting street musicians, the couples nuzzling each other’s mouths, the young nomads with their humped backpacks; she’s part of the crowd. In Wenceslas Square, a camera is thrust in her hand by a young couple wanting to be photographed. “Against that building, there!” the
young man requests excitedly. “Where Havel spoke!” She smiles at them and wonders if they feel they’re unique individuals standing on the stage of history, the most exciting play of all. If everyone in the endless stream crossing the bridge feels that. Further on, boutiques with Bohemian glass; an inconspicuous house which for some reason reminds her of a Sienese painting she saw recently, somewhere. She looks up at a flurry of robins swooping down on some treasure of breadcrumbs; looks up at the wispy white cloud, passing; and is suddenly pierced by incompleteness. There are only these fragments, grazing the retina, only her one self, moving in and out of the great historical museum, as provisional and wispy as all the others. She sidles into a crowded café, opens Wolfe’s
Journal
.
August 7, 1982
The cellist today. She had the sheer nerve to tell me I should live more in the moment. Aside from the arrogance of such a statement, I was struck by its naivety. Living in the moment! Does she not understand the supreme difficulty of such a feat? What it takes to free a moment to be itself? Of course she doesn’t. She thinks living in the moment is equivalent to “having fun.” I have observed these youths of both sexes trying to “have fun” at their drunken parties, throwing each other into the pond at night, or hooting at each other on forest paths. I have heard their false and grim sounds, straining to laugh the hardest, to shout loudest, until, presumably, they reach the acme point of fun …
One of the young nomads, a hefty, pasty-faced girl, has approached her table, and is asking if she can sit down. Isabel gives a cursory nod, and the girl—she reminds her of someone,
who is it?—carefully swivels herself out of her large backpack, which promptly trips up a fast-moving waiter. “Oooff,” she emits, self-explanatorily, as she plops into a chair. “
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
” Isabel shakes her head no, hoping that’ll be the end of it; but the girl obligingly switches to English.
“Many people, yes?” she interrogatively declares. Isabel nods, minimally; but the girl doesn’t need encouragement.
“I travel through seven countries already,” she states, with satisfaction. Isabel is about to pick up her book, but the girl continues confidingly. “I enjoy the travels very much. I keep a notebook, every day. I feel it is important to do this. So it will not get lost, you know, my experience. My adventures. I’ve had very interesting adventures.”
“Oh yes?” Isabel asks. She now knows who the girl reminds her of. It’s Sabine, Kolya’s long-ago tenant.
The girl looks at Isabel slyly. “In Bucharest, someone tried to make me a slave.”
Isabel is mildly interested in what story the girl might concoct. “A slave?” she repeats.
“Yes,” the girl says eagerly. “I was traveling with some girls from the Ukraine … and they tried to trap us in this house. So they could sell us later.”
“But why are you telling this to a stranger?” Isabel asks, hoping this will indicate her disbelief.
“Oh, my name is Monika,” the girl says, as if that would take care of the problem. “And I don’t mind telling about it. It was kind of … exciting.”
“Ah,” Isabel says, and Monika proceeds to tell her story pell-mell, and with enough unlikely detail so that Isabel begins to believe it.
“They just trapped you?” she nevertheless asks. “On the street?” Even though Monika doesn’t seem to be lying, the tale she unfolds is improbably medieval, with its girl-snatching
and pirates on the global highway.
“No, it wasn’t like that, they invited us into their house, and we went along, and then, you know, we were locked up.”