Quartet for the End of Time (24 page)

Alden looked at him blankly.

Underground work, the professor said.

They continued in silence.

I thought it best, the professor began again, clearing his throat and hunching his shoulders as if against the wind, though it was blowing at their backs, to wait a while before speaking to you. Before … making any decisions.

Quickly, but pointedly now, he glanced in Alden's direction. So quickly, indeed, that Alden failed to catch his eye.

A
ND SO WINTER PASSED
and spring began. Toward the end of April, and owing, in the end, more directly to the professor's connections than his own, Alden left his position at the
Post
and was given a job at the State Department. At first his responsibilities and the pattern of his days seemed hardly to change at all, but still Alden felt pleased by the professor's obviously increased confidence in him, and he began to see much more of him than he previously had. On one occasion—perhaps three months had gone by, perhaps more—the professor had even said to Alden, with a teasing glint in his eye, You know, I am almost feeling that
we can begin to trust you. However—he had continued hurriedly—you still have much to learn.
Humility
, he'd said—laying heavy emphasis on the word—perhaps, most of all. Before his downfall a man's heart is always proud.

I
T WAS AROUND THIS TIME
, shortly after Alden left the
Post
and took up his job at the State Department, that he first met Joe Hodge. Joe was only a few years older than himself, but had already completed two years at Columbia Business School, read everything that Marx, Lenin, and Louis B. Boudin had ever written, been sent overseas on “underground” work, and was now rising steadily through the ranks of the State Department. Joe was solid—a man on whom anyone could depend. He was even built that way, with the thick neck, broad shoulders, and big bland eyes of an ox. Even the way he spoke was so steady and sure that by the time he had said anything you were already convinced not only that you'd heard it before, but that you'd probably said it yourself. It was this that made him such a good spy. In fact, though, by the time Alden met Joe (and despite how solid he still appeared from the outside, right up until the end), he had already been badly rattled.

Alden's own position at the State Department had been arranged, once again, through a mutual acquaintance of both his father and the professor—Barney Coates. Coates was a longtime party member, but in the fashion of Joe he was the last person you would suspect to have any belief or opinion that differed from your own—it didn't matter what those beliefs or opinions might be. From time to time, Coates might have been accused of being a tad “sentimental”—which was what, back in 1933, they were still calling anyone who leaned a little left—but like Hodge, he was “solid,” and there wasn't even a whiff of suspicion surrounding him or his various “sentimental” endeavors and affairs until just before the war, when nearly everyone else had been shaken from the tree.

So it was Coates who got Alden the job. At the suggestion of the professor, he'd approached Alden's father personally about an opening that Alden (he'd said) might be just the man to fill. They needed someone quick and smart, Coates told the Judge—but without too much experience.
They generally preferred it that way, he'd said. To train their men themselves. Not have them come in with
bad habits
already thoroughly ingrained. He was sure the Judge would understand. And didn't he also agree—Coates wondered—that (even with how young Alden still was) it was about time to seriously think of the way he would make his way in the world? And that there were a lot more avenues that a man might travel down, were he so inclined, within the government, than along “newspaper row”?

Judge Kelly had, of course, heartily agreed. But mentioned, as it was only fair to do, that there
had
been a time in the fairly recent past when he himself had questioned his son's sense of … proportion in certain matters. Alden had, however—he was quick to add—certainly learned a lesson or two since then, and—he added even more quickly—he certainly appreciated Coates's offer; opportunities like that, as they both knew for a fact, didn't come knocking every single day.

Coates had nodded solemnly—then assured the Judge that the job he proposed (one with some “real direction and responsibility”) was just the thing for someone Alden's age, with a questionable sense of proportion. At that, the Judge offered Coates his hand—gone, uncharacteristically, limp with gratitude.

I
T WASN
'
T UNTIL HIS
third week at the office that Alden first met Joe. He came into the office with that swivel of his head, first left, then right, that Alden would come to recognize. It was not as if he were looking for anything over his shoulder—just as though he were straightening out a kink in his stiff neck.

Then he pulled up a chair and sat down squarely in front of Alden, hanging his hat on his knee.

Joe had grown up in New York, on the Lower East Side, and had been involved with the party since the age of fourteen. At first he had gone to all the meetings and rallies; had even helped organize the last great Young Pioneers Christmas celebration in Madison Square Garden in 1930. He had decorated the revolutionary Christmas tree himself, and stood ringside during the boxing match that had been organized between
“science” and “religion.” Heywood Broun, that eternal champion of the underdog, had acted as the referee; no wonder, then, that “religion” won in the seventh round by KO before “God” himself walked in—dressed in a business suit and followed by a coterie of priests and rabbis (fifteen-year-old boys and girls dressed in oversized bathrobes) to present the award. It had been, Joe recalled, a terrific party.

But then, just a few months later, as Joe was finishing up his second year at Columbia, he was asked to go underground. At first he was flattered—but pretty soon he understood what sort of sacrifices “underground” work required of him. He quit school. That was fine by him, he said. But then they asked him to quit the party (the great Christmas celebration of 1930 was his last hurrah) and move to Midtown. He hardly saw his friends any more and spent his time shuffling between the docks, in order to greet Soviet spies (who came off the boats without speaking a word of English), and their apartments (which, in contrast to his own modest digs, were aggravatingly well appointed). It had driven him crazy, he told Alden, after they'd established their odd friendship—in which, over drinks after work each evening, Joe would mutter away over his whiskey, becoming increasingly distracted as he spoke.

At first—on account of the intense aggravation and loneliness of underground work, and the time he had spent in the Don River Valley and the Upper Caucasus—it had been a relief for Hodge when he got the State Department job. But by the time Alden met him, only six months on, he was getting nervous as hell again.

What are you worried about, Joe? Alden would say. They'd suspect the President before they'd suspect you.

It was true. Even if you counted Joe's Young Pioneer days, he was the least sentimental person you were ever liable to meet. Still, when the subject turned, as it often did with Joe, to the Don River Valley—the five weeks he had spent there in the spring of '32, just prior to landing his job with the State—his voice would begin to tremble, then break.

You know what I'd like? he'd say—and as he spoke, his thick hand would shake so much it rattled the ice in his glass. I'd like the President
himself to go over there. See if that wouldn't inspire him a little. Make sure he did everything he could to keep that sort of thing from happening
here.

But look, Alden would say, that's just what he's trying to do.

It was the spring of 1933, Roosevelt's first hundred days. Even the most sentimental among them believed, at least, that the worst was over.

Just because it's not written down in a book somewhere, Alden said on one occasion in an effort to cheer Joe up, doesn't mean we can't recognize a good thing when it comes. Hell, you might miss the revolution, he said, if you've got your nose buried, looking for it in the pages of a book!

At that, Joe had nodded seriously over his drink, but his pale eyes strayed. He glanced quickly to his left.

Yes, I would agree with you there, he said, but he seemed distracted now, as though he no longer remembered what it was he was agreeing with, or what had been said. Then in no time at all they would be back at the Don River.

If he could just see those kids, he'd say. Staring up at us like that. If he could just see it like I did. Hear—like I did—what
hunger
sounds like. Hear a man, turning on his own children; saying,
Why don't you kids just go ahead and die—

But that last word would get so stuck in poor Joe Hodge's throat, he'd have to stop to clear it. Then he'd glance around, like there was that crick in his neck, before beginning again.

The “New Deal,” he'd scoff, sensing Alden ready to cut in—that's politics for you, not revolution.

But
that's
—Alden would burst out, exasperated, and referring to the story to which Joe repeatedly returned—
the past!
At this, Joe would nod solemnly; say that, in principle, he agreed, then glance first left, then right once more—as though he were actually looking for it to catch up with him.

A
T THAT TIME
,
IT
was still commonly believed that the famine in Russia, of which there were still only scattered reports, was a mere invention
—a propagandist's ploy of the most conservative type. But the Utopian vision of Stalin's Russia, in which Joe, too, had once fervently believed, and been so eager to see with his own eyes, could not now be scoured from them. As hard as he tried, he could not rid himself of it. It had a stranglehold on him so tight that, he admitted—after a few drinks had loosened up his throat enough so he could speak of it—he often found it difficult to breathe.

It comes over me, he told Alden one evening, all of a sudden, like that. Like someone's got their hands on my throat. I see them. I see those kids in front of me—just like I saw them then, and I get this sick feeling inside.

They don't look human, see! Just … looking at them—I can hardly bear it. Even then, I just wanted to—to get the hell out. But then I thought about that. About how despicable that was. To look straight into the face of something like that, and think only of myself. About
getting away
. Getting
out
. Out of that filthy little hole … with those filthy kids staring up at me. As if—as if I could
do
something!

There were the rumors, too, Joe said. That those, you know, who had managed to survive had done so only by eating the flesh of their own kin. Can you even imagine—? Joe said. No. Thank God. You can't. But I can, he said. Do you know what it's like to live like that? (Staring straight ahead, past Alden now.) All those images, mixing about in your head the way they do in dreams, so you can't even tell any longer what's real and what's not?

At dinner with my wife, say— Joe said. Hovering over a bite of food. The color might drain suddenly from it; I won't be able to move my fork an inch closer to my face. The entire meal will start to stink. And then even the color of my wife's face—my beautiful wife—will begin to drain. I'll start to hate her. And—and all of it. It all just starts to—
disgust
me, see. The way she—my wife—just continues to sit there and eat—as though ravenously—digging at her food. She starts to look like a jackal, sitting there—ripping the tiny carcass of a duck or a quail on her plate. Picking at the little bones. Once in a while taking one from her mouth and laying it at the side of the plate—her bright white teeth, the only thing suddenly with any color, flashing.

I start to wonder to myself if she would eat me—if it came to it. I start to feel afraid. I can feel the cold fingers of fear, like little nails scraping against the inside of my throat. And because I think I might start to scream, I have to get up and go out back, and pace up and down a little just to cool myself off. I try to think about other things. I do simple arithmetic just to calm myself down. To convince myself that there are still simple equations in the world—the existence beyond me of something larger, more enduring, than the images that shift and change so constantly before my eyes.

But I can still feel it. Even as I calm myself, and make my way back to the table. To my wife, my comfortable rooms. Even as my wife looks up and says, Is everything all right? And I say, Yes.
Yes.
I can still feel it in the back of my throat as I speak. It doesn't ever go away. It lingers, and each time it comes over me it stays a little longer, so I fear that one day it won't go away at all. That one night I will not be able to return; that I'll leave my wife to line up her little bones at the edge of her dish alone; to clatter her knife and her fork on an eternally emptying plate and wonder what's keeping me; why I don't return …

O
NLY THEN WOULD
J
OE
look up. A little puzzled—to see Alden, still there, staring back at him—as if he had, indeed, only just then awakened from a long and complicated dream. He would shake his head, even smile a little. A sort of shyness, Alden thought—embarrassment, even.

But it was not that. Like every solidly built American man, Joe was not easily embarrassed. It was simply not in his constitution. It was only later, when Alden thought back on that smile (it was really just the hint of one, his thin lips curled up only very slightly at the corners), that he recognized the look Joe Hodge gave him in those moments for what it really was.

It was pity. Pity that Joe extended toward him then. Not the sort of self-satisfaction that is so often mistaken for pity, but the genuine kind. A pure gift—an offering. And so the shyness that Alden had detected a moment before, from the great, impassable Joe Hodge, who, at the age of only twenty-seven and at the peak of his career as a Soviet spy, might
have been in full daylight mistaken for the thirty-first President of the United States, was due to the fact that in those brief moments he was completely unprotected, unguarded, and in so being, recognized in Alden what Alden did not: his ignorance. Which, in a pure moment of generosity, Joe took as his own. So for those few moments as Joe looked across at Alden, they were ignorant together—though Alden did not know it then. Joe felt then, for both of them, what it would take Alden many more years to understand. That they did not, either of them, deserve their fates—whatever they were going to be.