Quartet for the End of Time (48 page)

When Alden got to the end of the letter, he went back to the beginning, and read again the descriptions of the Henderson war dead with which it had begun: the number of battles each had fought in, the medals received, the number of wounds that had been inflicted—recovered from, or not—even the number of attendees at the Henderson funerals in that part of the country where the Henderson men's courage and sacrifice had long been a source of pride. As he read it all a second time, it resounded on a very different note, which he thoroughly failed to understand. The deep sincerity that he had first detected in the words was clearly mixed—he saw now—with a fatal cynicism. The two could not be extracted from each other, and yet neither could they be understood as one. Alden himself was still at that time both too sincere and already too cynical to see that he was either one, or to understand, as Emmett's mother did, the ways that the two were irresolvably joined—so that there was no more boundary between them than there was between the living and dead.

You have to get very, very close to death—as Emmett's mother did then—to really see it like that. That is, to really see the way, as Emmett's mother implied she herself had seen—sitting up on the Henderson burial plot at the edge of town, her muddied heels crossed, her head bent, trying not to look around at a view that stretched as far as the eye could see in glorious, irresponsible blues and browns—the way the dead and the living were indeed all mixed up together. So that as she stared at the graves of the long-dead ancestors of her son, the boundaries that had once been fixed in her mind—not only between nations and other allegiances, not only between the suffering of women and the suffering of men, but even between her own fixed position above and those below— began to blur to such an extent that she had to push very hard against the rock beside her, push hard enough to make the knuckles and the ends of her fingers turn white, in order to gain some assurance of the durability of the things of this world, and remind herself that she was still alive.

Once this was, again, reaffirmed, Alden imagined (though this she did not recount) she would make her way again down the slope, very slowly, extracting the talons of her shoes, which sought to dig themselves
farther and farther into the earth with every step, and return to her living room—driven there perhaps by the indistinct figure (amounting for the purposes of this retelling really to just a cigarette out the window, a turned-down collar, a hat) of her husband, who, waving the lingering smoke from the car as he witnessed her approach, nodded silently as she slid into the leather seat beside him, and gunned the motor, which had not ceased muttering all that time. And all evening, reestablished within the comfort of her living room, with the familiar photographs on the walls, the never-used china in the cupboards (inherited from her grandmother, on the English side), and the porcelain figurines, which she collected—twenty-nine of the thirty-one replicas presently available of the presidents of the United States (she was only missing Franklin Pierce and hadn't bothered with F. Delano yet, either, and for good reason)—she would drink gin and listen to the radio and call out occasionally into the vast reaches of the house small remarks about whatever it was she heard on the news—just for the exercise of comprehending the distance between herself and the rest of the world.

—

A
FTER
E
MMETT WAS GONE THEY WOULD GATHER AT
DI
CK
'
S PLACE IN
the eleventh—near to where, just off the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir, the Canal Saint-Martin plunges beneath a treed median in order to continue its journey underground. Carol had not yet left Dick, and Jack and Paige were together, too—not yet dispersed as they soon would be (he rather farther away than she). Like Alden, Jack worked at the embassy— though much higher up. How he managed it was a mystery to all of them; he was the least diplomatic man any of them had ever met. He would often joke about it himself as he happily enumerated his latest gaffes. It was no doubt that his extraordinary tactlessness, if it did not contribute to misunderstandings and grievances in the public sphere, led at the very least to the great unhappiness that was his marriage. More often than not, when Paige and Jack were together, Paige would sit there on the sofa, her fat lower lip jutted out, looking like she was going to cry,
while Jack—one thigh swung over the other—leaned as far away from her as he could and talked sideways to whoever was within range. You could tell even her presence there beside him got under his skin, and before too long he would get up and begin prowling the room. He was like a cat—he always knew who in any given crowd didn't like him, just on instinct, and would immediately approach, cornering them for an entire evening, in order to share his views on the latest topic, while his wife continued to sit alone in the corner, batting back tears from her big, beautiful eyes.

The poet Maurice Bonheur would be there, too: their only real “French connection,” as they called him. Everything they did delighted him. So
Américain
! he would say about the simplest and most inconsequential things, when no one else but him could see why. Then he would get that look on his face, and they would know he was storing whatever it was that had struck him so particularly away for a poem.

He would last the war. Later, indeed, when everyone else had left Paris, he would be Alden's only friend. They would meet on the Boulevard Saint-Michel and he would read to Alden the long poems he continued to write, and once would even do him the disservice of suggesting that with his own small, cryptic poems he was really onto something.

Then there was Dick. He, too, would remain through the war—in the ambulance service. The two of them, Dick and Alden, would uphold a dwindling friendship, Dick distancing himself more and more, then finally going mad. He would stop eating and all the hair would fall out of his head, and after the war would be rescued by his mother, a Spanish princess, and taken to a well-reputed mental institution in upstate New York, where, as far as anyone knows, he remains.

Later, when Alden himself had returned to the States, he would think of him—about how interesting it would be to visit him, if he could ever get up the nerve and secure the permission to go. Imagine it! The madman and the condemned. They could talk about the old days. About that evening—just shortly after Emmett died—that had ended with Dick catching Jack with a back-fist to the eye, and making him bleed. About the way that Paige had sat there the whole time, watching, with the same
irritatingly beautiful look on her face she always wore. He would ask Dick why he had chosen to go completely mad, or if he had—and if he had, if he was glad that he had, and what it was like. He would ask him if there were certain signs by which he knew he was going mad before or when he did. If maybe there were signs the rest of them could have picked up on, too—even all those years ago. That is, if there were certain clues that, if they went back even to that night they could have picked out and put together with other little clues and in the end formed some sort of picture of the way things would go. If they could have foreseen Dick himself, skeletal and hairless, emerging from his apartment after the war carried by two orderlies—his mother following behind, her face pinched, as though composing herself for the benefit of some observer to the scene, though there wasn't any. Just Alden, standing at the bottom of the stairs next to the poet Maurice Bonheur. Maurice sort of glancing over at him from time to time with that look on his face, as if to say,
I'm here, I'm here
, and he, with a rising panic, wanting to shout at him,
Goddammit, I know!

Alden would have liked to ask Dick if he sometimes felt that way, too. How excruciating it was to be sitting around with a bunch of people who kept reminding you they were still there.
Well, we're all still here, and that's something.
As if that were really something! To exist! He'd like to ask Dick if maybe that was what drove him crazy in the end—everyone so pleased simply to exist. If that was maybe why he wanted to disappear, why he had stockpiled rations in his third-floor apartment off the Boulevard Richard-Lenoir (which, unlike most of them, who lived only in a few rooms, was really—on account of the Spanish princess—an
apartment
, with a grand dining room and high ceilings and doors that swung out onto little balconies overlooking the street) until he had constructed a barricade, which the authorities actually had to destroy in order to be able even to get past the front door. Even standing outside with Maurice Bonheur, Alden could hear the great clatter of tins falling and then rolling around on the hardwood inside, and neither of them had the least clue what it was until afterward, when one of the policemen explained.

Alden would have liked, he thought, to sit down with Dick now, maybe hold his hand. The way he pictured it, Dick's hand would be as thin and cold-looking as it had been the day he was first taken from his apartment (though, with any luck, being housed now in such a plush institution, he had managed to fill out a bit again), but either way Alden thought he would like to hold his hand, and ask, Do you still agree with what you said then? That evening, so many years ago now—what seems like centuries—when I read a portion of Emmett's mother's letter out loud? And if he had any trouble recollecting, Alden would say: That bit, you know, about how there was a certain “senselessness” to everything. You said—do you remember now?—that that was wrong. It
did
make sense, you said. All of it. There was a gleam in your eye, as I recall it—maybe that was a bit of madness in you, already then. You said that, of course, it was a shame about Emmett's mother, and an even greater shame about Emmett himself, but there was a greater system in play than just the relation between mothers and sons, and certainly than between individual nations and men. If we expected Emmett's mother to see the sense in it, or even to see it ourselves, then we certainly weren't looking at the thing from the right direction. But she got one thing right, you said. There
are
no boundaries—no boundaries at all; and that—
that
(didn't we see it now? you asked) was what Emmett was fighting for! Further, you suggested—and now there was that gleam more than ever in your eye, though everyone had begun to shift in their seats and Carol had got up to get more wine, rubbing her neck, because she always got physically sore when you talked this way—that if all those old soldiers, all of the dead relatives Emmett was buried beside now, could crawl out from their graves—if they could get up and dust themselves off—they would have been fighting beside Emmett, too, because they, of all people—they who had been dead for so many years and to whom all things had become gloriously relative—wouldn't have known or cared anymore what they were fighting for, or for whom.

As gloriously relative, Alden had reflected at the time, as it had been for Emmett himself; at least as he had expressed it in the last letter Alden ever received from him (which he had not passed on to Emmett's mother
or shown to Dick or to anyone, but kept for himself). It had been written on the fifth of May, 1937, shortly after the street fighting in Barcelona had begun. He had dived for cover down a narrow alleyway—surprising a POUM fellow also seeking cover there. The fellow swore loudly when he saw Emmett—in English. It turned out, Emmett explained, the fellow was a Brit. Instead of shooting at each other, then, the two swapped cigarettes and stories, and discovered that for some months they had both been considering swapping sides, too. The POUM fellow thought it might be better to join the International Brigade, because he was sick and tired of wallowing in the mud at a distance of over a thousand yards from the enemy—unable to approach any closer because they didn't have any weapons. He grumbled that until this “play-fighting” in the streets had erupted a few days before he had been inclined to believe there wasn't really a war going on in Spain at all—that it had all just been made up as a serial fiction for the
News Chronicle
. Emmett had joined the International Brigade himself six months before but it was becoming clear, he said, that the Soviets were deliberately sabotaging their revolutionary hopes in order to maintain diplomatic relations with Britain and France. He'd rather be fighting with the anarchists, he said—who at least believed in something.

In those moments, talking with the POUM fellow, and all during the time that led up to his death a few days later when he was caught in the crossfire (and who knew which bullets finally entered him first, and from what side?), what struck him more than anything else, he wrote (he, who had railed against Blum, and denied that the thing even existed as a possibility in the hearts of men!), was the absolute
neutrality
of all those who were fighting—or supposed to be fighting—in Spain. A sense of utter futility had descended over the whole affair. He had seen it happen himself, he wrote. Had watched as, over the course of the six short months he had spent in the country, its citizens had gone from behaving in good proletariat fashion (both men and women, dressed in overalls, addressed you as “comrade” and performed military drills in the streets) to behaving just as they always had. Gradually, the expensive restaurants were reopened. The rich people inside and the poor people out. It
was not, Emmett wrote, that anything had changed—first one way and then back—from the beginning, the whole thing had been a sham! Now all anyone wanted was for everything to get back to “normal,” and as quickly as possible. It was absolutely despicable, Emmett wrote, how shortsighted we remain—
insist
on remaining—as a human race. The words on the lips of the rich as well as the poor—and even on those of the English bloke he had enjoyed a cigarette with while they dodged bullets together from their respective sides—regarded the “natural order” of things: that pervasive belief among everyone alike—the rich, the poor, the Fascists, Republicans, even the anarchists—that there existed some sort of natural state to which we might be able to return. That it was more “natural” somehow that the rich should eat in expensive restaurants—a thing inscribed in the blood, which no amount of marching around in overalls could change!