The American Ambassador (45 page)

He watched her shake her head. She raised her arms, and then let them fall, a gesture of exhaustion. She said, “No,” shaking her head vigorously, a denial.

“Oh, yes,” he said. “All of it's true. It is very vivid. It is vivid still.”

“My God—” she began.

He smiled. It always came as such a surprise, the subplot, the thing taking place offstage, in the wings. So disconcerting, when you applied theory to memory, meaning when you applied a theory of history to history itself. When you rejected the benign interpretation, a belief in good will or ill luck or the purest chance in the way the facts cavorted. There were those with power and those without power and the powerless would not be liberated until the powerful were eliminated, shot dead. No middle ground. Either you had a Browning or you didn't. So now he had given her another Africa, a seething, burning Africa, and it seemed not to agree with her Africa of fragrant gardens and willing, childlike servants, nicknamed like household pets; or Jack Armstrong and Siegfried on the prowl. She lived in a Western dream world.
We were very happy there. Your father and I and you, too, loved Africa.
Loving it most when they were destroying Africans.
We used to be inseparable as a family, your father and I, and you, too.

He watched her put her hand to her temples. He said, “Later that night, back in the capital, back home, embassy ghetto, you called your father in Illinois. On the telephone with your father you were very stiff upper lip, British memsahib. You described to him the kind of day you'd had. And you told him what you had not bothered to tell me. You said,
We almost lost him.
Can you imagine what I thought, hearing that? But I had my secrets, too.”

“It was not my father,” she said. “It was your father's father. It was Grandfather North I called that night.”

He shrugged. “Then he went away again, back to the United States, with you. He had to make his report. I was left alone with Charles, and the other . . . boys. You'll be surprised to learn that Charles was trying to educate himself. He was trying to learn to read English. I was five years old, and I could read better than he could. So I tutored him. At
five.
And he told me about the village he came from, the life there; the political life of the village, what the people believed in, and what brought him to the capital. He was the sixth son of a chief, did you know that? Your Charles, head boy. That would be the sort of thing you'd appreciate, a fine old county family. Someone came by every afternoon to see how I was getting on, those weeks when he was at the State Department and CIA reporting on his misadventures, and the state of play on the Dark Continent. Sometimes it was the fascist German, sometimes one of the embassy people. How're things, Billy. Have everything you need? Heard from your folks today, they're fine, be home soon. By then, of course, the coup was over. The government had prevailed, and the streets were quiet. When I asked Charles about it, he was not communicative. The time was not right, he said. There had been a mistake. We had been reading from
Huckleberry Finn
, a child's version, one of my books. Too many Nigger Jims, he said. He did not know the embassy's role. But now there are quite a few documents available from that time, and it's no mystery what the embassy tried to do. What
he
tried to do. His role in aborting the revolution. Naturally it did not stay aborted for long, Africa being Africa . . .”

“I knew who Charles was,” she said, exasperated, her voice rising. “I knew where he came from, what his aspirations were.”

“Because the embassy ran a check, right?”

“He told me,” she said.

“You can't remember the nightmares, but you remember that.”

“My God, Bill.”

“Every night,” he said.

She sighed, a long, drawn-out sigh. She seemed to diminish, her shoulders slumping.

He thought, Almost there now. “That's only one slice of history from my magnificent childhood.”

She said, “It's fiction.”

“No,” he said. “It's real enough.”

She said, “I didn't say it wasn't real. I said it was fiction.”

How they loved to conceal their own duplicity, and the evil consequences of their actions. Americans with their myriad instruments of surveillance, cameras, wires, sensors, satellites, aircraft. The countries of the West were wired for sound, no conversation so casual that it would escape the electronic monitor. But still they knew nothing. They could not put what they knew into context, because they did not believe in history. They said, It's fiction. Meaning: Oh, it's real enough to you, but it isn't the truth. They wanted things to be nice so that they could sleep soundly at night. He looked at her now, so defeated. They accepted their mediocrity, reveled in it. No accident that he was who he was, a man to put things right. To redress the balance. To indict them for their crimes, though looking at her now, so pathetic, it hardly seemed worth the trouble. Still, there was a debt owed. He would require full payment. It was his pleasure and obligation to do so. They, he and Gert, had risked so much, focusing their lives at a single point. They had neglected nothing, forgotten nothing. His inspiration was Gert. She was a great hero, like La Pasionaria or Emma Goldman or Rosa Luxemburg. He had restored her to life, had replaced that which they had stolen from her; she would be his forever. He loved her with all his soul, and even now he grew heavy, thinking of her. He could feel her urgent breath on his neck, commanding him. He did not need to love anyone else, for his love must not be diluted. He wanted purity of heart, purity of action. And must do nothing to betray her. Her trust was absolute, and he would leave nothing undone to guarantee it. He and Gert and their compatriots, so intimate, close as lovers, so harmonious with their single vision of justice—they had agreed long ago: no compromise, no clemency. No peace. Let the game be played on German soil. They would pursue their enemies to the ends of the earth and they had to be lucky only once. They had taken an oath on it, in the names of all the revolutionary dead, in this century and the stupendous last century, and all the centuries of struggle and sacrifice. They acted in the name of humanity. Now they would realize their great vision, and set the clock ticking. A single act calculated to outrage and bewilder their enemies, to exhaust their patience and comprehension, and introduce to them this brainstorm: that anything was possible, that there were no exclusions, no forbearance, no compassion, no limit. He said in English, “You must take responsibility.”

“Responsibility,” she said dully, looking at him. What did he mean? Responsibility for what?

He said, “Find him. Bring him here.”

She shook her head, not trusting herself to speak.

“Get him now.”

“I'm here,” the ambassador said, emerging suddenly from the dusk.

 

He had watched them from the beginning, watched Elinor and the girl, Elinor looking at the sketches, the girl's sweet smile. He himself could not be seen, and did not want to interfere. He watched the girl hurry away, then his wife and son together, talking. The boy appeared as if by magic, no more than ten feet from him. Bill watched Elinor's face come alight, a smile any mother would give a returning son, even a prodigal; most particularly a prodigal.
I don't care where you've been, or what you've done, you're mine, and I forgive you.
He believed that somehow Elinor could connect. He had not thought beyond that—only connect, and then see what would follow. Odd how one ignored the experience of a lifetime. It was the amateur's approach to any summit meeting. Anything could follow if only they got to know each other again, talked across a table, had a drink together and located common ground. Surely there would be common ground. Listening to them, he wondered what it was he hoped for. A tearful reconciliation? Expressions of love? Perhaps a mutual acknowledgment of past error, dignified apologies. A sentence or two of atonement, with a promise to forget the past.

The truth was, the time for connection was long past—and, in fact, there was a connection. But it was not a “connection.” It was not vivifying. He hated her. He hated them both. And it was not theoretical, it was personal. It was
them.
Listening to his son, he closed his eyes. The boy was talking about Africa, their common life together; he closed his eyes and tried to imagine the five-year-old with tousled hair and solemn expression, the bright boy who always seemed older than his years. The boy who knew too much. The boy who demanded that a picture be removed from the wall of his room before he could go to sleep at night. It didn't matter which picture: one had to go. It was a cute ritual, a family joke, his grave insistence, his pudgy finger moving, then stopping:
There, that one!
Except that all of them were Elinor's, drawn with her own hand. His eyes squeezed shut, the ambassador tried to make something of that. It was an obvious technique of the diplomatic craft, what you want and what they want, and trying to find consequence in an unconscious or trivial act, fooling with language. Anything to get an agreement, some common ground on which all parties could stand without shame. When you dealt from strength you always wanted agreement because agreement proposed stability: a predictable future, meaning a future much like the past. And that was precisely what the opposition did not want. So you watched the
which
clauses and where the commas went, and you understood that it was all a dance in fulfillment of the natural cycle, eat or be eaten. Perhaps his demand that a picture be removed from his bedroom wall was an undeclared wish to destroy his mother's fertility. Or perhaps he didn't like the view.

He stepped from behind the tree and went to Elinor's side. He and the boy looked at each other. He felt his son's vitality, his nervous energy, his resolve and elation. It all came down to this. Never had he felt more a bankrupt, an old nation opposing a young one; and the young one was of his own making. He said, “We're here. What do you want?”

“She can go. You stay.”

Elinor linked her arm through Bill's, smiling at him. Then she turned back to her son. “Why me?” she asked. “And as I told you before, don't speak to us in that tone of voice.” She thought, A little bit prim in the circumstances. Mom as headmistress. And as she spoke she heard her own mother's flat midwestern voice, and that caused her to smile.

Perhaps Bill Jr. heard it too, for he said, petulantly, “You're not in charge here.”

Bill thought,
Grübelei.
The shape of the table, square, rectangular, round, oblong; coffin-shaped, dumbbell-shaped, Z-shaped, T-shaped. It had been months and months, working that one out. The opposition knew we were tired, and that gave them an advantage; unfortunately, the reverse was not also true. They were not tired, and our knowledge of that was no help at all. Those talks, it was like listening to Pachelbel's Canon for six months, no relief. He had made that remark to Elinor long ago and Bill Jr. had looked up and said, Who's Papa Bell?

He put his arm around Elinor, realizing as he did so that his hand had gone numb. Fowler and the hospital room, Richard and the nurses, came back to mind, in and out of his memory. He wondered if they had missed a fragment, or whether the numbness was psychosomatic. His mind was numb, along with the hand. Papa Bell: They had laughed and laughed, and couldn't explain the joke to Bill Jr., he was so young. He caught his breath, feeling Elinor's warmth. Her scent filled his nostrils, and he drew closer to her. He kissed her on the cheek, feeling her soft warmth, and feeling furtive also, as if the affection between them was forbidden, and would be taken as a sign of weakness.

The boy said, “So here we are at last.”

“Speak English,” Bill said.

“This is normal,” the boy said, continuing in German. So that was the way it would go, they speaking in English, the boy in German.

“We met your girl,” Bill said.

“My girl,” Bill Jr. said. “She's not
my girl.
What do you think she is, a servant?”

“Your girl,” Bill said. “She's very pretty.”

“She was dressed up for you to”—he sought the word—“admire.”

Bill said, “Besides the girl, how many are you?”

“Many,” he said.

“They hate Americans,” Bill said. “Why do they trust you?”

“I hate Americans even more than they do. Isn't that what you always said? It takes one to know one. Isn't that one of your—”

“Clichés, yes,” Bill said.

“We haven't much time. You have no idea, the effort. And the luck.”

Bill said, “Congratulations, then.”

“Get on with it,” Elinor said. “Whatever it is.”

“They were with you this morning, your shadows.”

“Who was with us?”

“Duer's people, three of them. Not at all difficult to spot, Herr Duer's storm troopers. He must be losing his touch. You lost them somehow because when you came back here they were gone.”

“They're not Duer's,” Bill said. “Probably they were somebody else's, my people maybe.” He knew the boy was lying, and the knowledge chilled him; the fact that he knew absolutely. His tone of voice, even in German; the way his mouth moved. The connection between them was direct. He wondered if the boy had the same ability.

“No, they were Duer's. We know who they are. We have photographs of them, and identities.”

He said, “We were not followed. Your mother wouldn't allow it.”

“So? And you, Ambassador?”

“She didn't ask me.”

“Clumsy, Ambassador. Very clumsy.”

Bill listened to him. He imagined he could hear his son's heartbeat, and trace his brain waves. And his son could surely do the same. But none of this would have any effect, except on his own emotions; he was shaken, realizing now the blood tie, and the reciprocity, between them.