Quartet for the End of Time (59 page)

As Alden and the poet Maurice Bonheur contemplated this, across the distance of an ocean and nearly twenty years, they agreed that it was, after all, only a very simple revelation that Alden had stumbled upon: that the logic by which the world seemed to be governed was in fact only the loosest of codes—one that could easily be pushed aside, slipped through, or rearranged. It was not that Alden had “escaped,” even momentarily, the system to which he was otherwise bound; his was not, that is—on either occasion—a revelation of gaps, or of holes he might first discover, then slip through. It was instead a sudden realization of the way in which he was a part of—and therefore responsible for, at least to a certain degree—the system itself. That (the possibilities within each moment being effectively endless) it was up to him at every turn; that he was, and would remain, the crucial interpreter of what would continue to prove an ultimately unfixable code.

I
N HIS ENTHUSIASM FOR
what they began to refer to as Alden's “pictograms,” Maurice Bonheur even managed to arrange a small show at the house of the painter Emil Gabor. It was an opportunity, Maurice encouraged him, to destroy the divide once and for all—not only between the
visual and literary arts now, but between
all
the arts; it was an opportunity Alden simply couldn't refuse. If he had, perhaps he would still have some trace of the work with him still.

As it was, the gallery space was raided by the police and the work confiscated. It was rumored that the show had been sabotaged—that someone had tipped off someone else that Gabor was a homosexual (a fact, if it was one, of which Maurice Bonheur swore to Alden later he'd been innocent). Alden was grateful he was never himself questioned regarding the affair, or his association with Gabor (which had after all been limited to a single exchange), and Maurice Bonheur apologized profusely for having gotten them into such a fix, the repercussions of which might have been far more serious than they were.

At any rate, the pictograms were gone. Having fulfilled their greatest promise: abstracting themselves, finally, to such a degree that, except for Alden's occasional, brief, memory of them, they completely disappeared. He was left with only the diagrams, according to which—if they still existed—the pictograms might have been reassembled. Of course, lacking any referent now, the diagrams were as useless to him as the instructions to a model airplane would be to a child missing all component parts. And though to this day he retains the manuscript within which he so carefully transcribed the hidden code of German spies, this information (whatever it was), too, has been abstracted to such a degree that it might as well have disappeared: the war is over. Before he was able to unravel the code.

—

B
UT AT ONE TIME
,
THERE WAS NO END IN SIGHT.
E
VEN WHEN THERE
was talk of it, no one any longer believed in “an end” at all—or not, at least, the way they had at the beginning. And yet somehow there was no rhythm to fall into anymore. The threat of being drawn, unwittingly or not, into the kind of fix the poet Maurice Bonheur had so narrowly avoided drawing them both into due to his association with the painter Emil Gabor continued to grow as the Germans (with the grip of a
drowning man) tightened their hold on the city. Not even the top officials at Abwehr or the OKW believed themselves to be truly safe. And there was good reason, too, for them to be afraid—though Alden would not learn of it until February 1944, when Canaris was dismissed and it came out that he (a German admiral who had headed Abwehr since 1935) had been working against the state for years. He had even obstructed the September 1943 plot to kidnap Pope Pius XII, and himself had plotted to kill Hitler.

If, Alden would later lament, he had known there existed such dissent within the Germans' own ranks, perhaps he would not have been so afraid! Perhaps he would even have had the nerve to enlist the help of Canaris's men in cracking the code he had stumbled upon, rather than only further burying it in his “manuscript,” or, later, his “pictograms,” and being lured by the possibility (all but promised to him by his friend Maurice Bonheur) of artistic innovation and glory into showing his work at the studio of an obscure painter who would shortly disappear. Had he had some inkling of the potential support he might have had within the ranks of those against whom he was trying to protect himself, perhaps— Alden would later suggest—they might have been able to crack the code as early as 1942, and circumvented half the war!

But it was useless to speculate about all of this after the fact. Even he could see that. He had known nothing, and believed himself to be acting utterly alone. Not only did he fear his own double-dealings would be at any moment suspicioned and revealed, he feared that his past associations with known Communists—Emmett Henderson, for example (though he had been dead for several years), and the American party (though all of his involvement with them had been officially deleted from the record since 1935 when he had gone “underground”)—would resurface somehow. He tried to assuage his fears on both counts by reminding himself that the Germans did not look too deeply into things. That they were, for the most part, content to look for and connect only the most obvious signs and symbols that existed (already known) on the surface.

Despite this, he grew increasingly anxious, and the more anxious he
became, the more complex and abstract his “recoding” strategies—as the pictograms attested—became. It was always a relief, come evening, to absorb himself in the absolute physicality of Marie-Claude's body, and his own. But the more he began to rely on the relief he felt—growing in him as he climbed the seven flights of stairs behind Marie-Claude, then exploding in a rush as he fell into her arms—the more abstract it became, and very soon he was no longer able to differentiate it from that most dangerous and abstract emotion of all, which, as everyone knows—is love.

What is most beautiful, after all, about love is also what makes it so terrifying: the sensation—as Alden reflected later—of having entrusted yourself into an unknown, as yet unimaginable world, which you are not certain is solid or will hold. It may be that the parts from which it's been made—those things, whatever they may have at one time been, that first convinced you of the fact that love existed at all; that appeared to you, at first, so real, so dazzlingly bright—turn out on further examination to have vanished years before. That the dizzying glow according to which you had been for so long drawn on, and which, during that time, kept you buoyed, afloat, was merely the reflection of that long-extinguished light. Just as the mind, which allows from a distance the glow of stars it knows may have vanished long ago, and does not quickly resort to extinguishing them in the eye (as it would extinguish, say, an apparition of a man, which turns out not to be a man at all, but instead the leaning post of a fence in semidarkness or the limbs of a tree), so the mind, in love, can sustain the shape of that which it knows may only be rendered visible by some long-extinguished source, which is not made up of matter at all, but exists only in the long delay between matter and reflected light.

It is within this realm, thought Alden, that the mind and the heart, in love, may freely wander—among a dazzling brilliance of stars, concerning which the mind no longer thinks to ask how long, how much, and the heart no longer thinks to ask how bright, how vast— but only looks and wonders. It is, Alden further reflected, one of the great mysteries, perhaps—given the remoteness of this realm, and the momentum that must be built up in the heart or mind that has loosed itself from the restrictive bonds of reality to float freely in that
kinder atmosphere (in which one hardly has to breathe! In which one can either hold one's breath interminably, or otherwise travel with one's own supply, breathing into a closed-circuit system of one's own creation!)—why it is that one finally falters there. Why the gaps begin to show—not merely as distances between the stars but as great and gaping holes in an uninhabitable atmosphere. Perhaps it is just that the governing properties, from which one thought to be released, never in fact do leave hold. That even at a great distance from the earth, or perhaps especially there, one is obliged to obey simple, physical laws. A man cannot, of course, sustain himself on his breath alone, or not, at least, for very long—he will begin to slowly poison himself. It is easy to imagine why it is often, therefore, with a degree of horror that (choking finally at the limit of a long-soured supply of air) he surveys his surroundings, finds them unforgiving, and returns to the less dazzling, but more durable, surface of the earth.

Perhaps it is, then, a simple question of gravity. As dull and ultimately uninhabitable as the earth itself can often seem, there is, perhaps, no other place more hospitable beyond—and so it is to the earth that we are constantly obliged to return. It was always, though, and each time equally, Alden thought, the greatest imaginable defeat to do so—to, as if instinctually, arrive again, gasping; to acknowledge that, by some atmospheric trick, the earth persists as the only environment a man is readily adapted to, and so must, more or less, remain.

I
T WAS ALONG THIS
course, at any rate, that Alden's love for Marie-Claude ran. At first he considered that his old paranoia might simply be returning; that his sudden reluctance in love might be owed only to a lingering fear of exposing Marie-Claude to the destructive power he once believed to be the purview of his affections … But then he thought back to Emmett Henderson, now long buried, and the great wheel, which continued (he reminded himself) to roll steadily along its invisible course, well beyond his own powers of perception and control, and tried, as best he could, to push the thought from his mind. And despite these first holes beginning to show—not to mention Alden's continued doubt
as to the prudence (for his own sake, if not for hers) of dragging the affair on any longer—he could not tear himself away.

Often, when the two of them parted (Marie-Claude reminding him gently that she would soon be obliged to return, to feed Franz Eckelmann and reposition him from his chair by the window to his bed by the stove) Alden would feel torn between begging her, on the one hand, never to leave him (not even, or especially, to return to Franz Eckelmann) and, on the other, turning away in disgust. He would play through the various imagined outcomes of these responses in his mind until he was quite sick of either course that lay open to him, and—when he had sufficiently contented himself that no solution existed and no decision could be made—he would take his leave from her in as neutral a fashion as he could. With a sinking heart, he would follow her down the stairs and wander alone to the brasserie on the corner, owned by the onelegged Italian, Marcello—from which point, some hours later, he would not mind so much the lonely route he would be obliged to take—coolly, disastrously, drunk—back to his solitary room, up seven flights of stairs.

It occurred to him, then—as he lay there at night in his bed, alone— that if he just managed to sustain this neutrality long enough the decision would be made, in any case, for him—and certainly not in his favor. He was not blind: he saw very clearly that in Marie-Claude lay what was perhaps his only real chance at happiness. What was happiness, after all, but the simple acceptance of chance: Marie-Claude's steps as she traveled around the Luxembourg Gardens one afternoon, happening, for a brief moment, to perfectly align with his own? What was it but the
choice
, to enter into chance events, and all the moments of one's own life, as one enters into words—allowing that (though they are not, and never can be,
the thing itself
) they are at least a decent representation, and from time to time may even come to stand in for that very thing?

But still, he could do nothing to disrupt the supreme neutrality with which he prepared himself in those days to accept what could only, he reasoned, be a decidedly unhappy fate. It even began, after a while (especially after the mishap with Gabor), to affect his pursuit of the code he'd discovered—the key to which had so long eluded him. He continued to
painstakingly record the pattern that appeared to him, but by now it had become for him a simple habit; he hardly strained any longer—as he had once done so ardently—to read into it any meaning at all. You might imagine his surprise, then, when there suddenly arrived—and around precisely the same time he ceased to expect it—if not the ultimate key with which he might have finally unlocked the code in its entirety, at least a veritable clue, which, once he had discovered it, did not need to be deciphered or abstracted in any way. Its meaning existed at the very surface; he recognized it at once!

So, too, did the German intelligence officers. But that was the beauty of it. Their “surface” was, and would remain to the end, very different from the one that had appeared so recognizably to him. So that was the trick! he thought. Of course. Like the very best art, the ultimate code must imitate nature to such a degree that the line between where the one ends and the other begins quite naturally begins to fall away. Rather than there appearing at the surface a single, fixed meaning—immediately identifiable to everyone, and in exactly the same way—the meaning of the code must exist (in the way that it always, most naturally, does) according to a shifting spectrum—contingent always on the particular moment and set of circumstances in which it is perceived. And rather than the code's true value (concealed within itself) existing so finally at odds with its representation as to be accessible only to a very few, every person who happens upon it would discover its value at once—each according to his own perspective.

So it was, in any case, when the body of a British Marines officer washed up on the beach just south of Bayonne in early March 1944, and the Germans happily went about accepting what appeared to them most immediately (the body belonged, as all the papers and identification retrieved from it indicated, to a certain Lieutenant Colonel Joseph Gordon Rawlings), that Alden recognized another, far more profound, value to the incident.