Short Century (26 page)

f

“Arthur Hunt” was supposed
to cut off the past, put everything that happened to me into a box marked “INGTON” and leave the Hunt to me, a fresh man with no history. This wouldn't be a bad idea for generations in general, cleaving off part of your parents' name. My son, had I had one, would have been named Hu—a nicely global sounding name, appropriate for the twenty-first century. My grandson would have been named H, perhaps appropriate for the H-bomb which Al Qaeda might yet steal from the former Soviet Union and with which it might—in, say, 2051, or tomorrow—obliterate New York. My great-grandson, deformed by this hypothetical radiation and by the distant stain of incest, would have no name at all for his own son to call out in the post-apocalyptic mud.

But as it turned out I remained a Huntington, no matter what I called myself. Family connections were not what I wanted to rely on, but they were all I had, so I sought out a friend of my father's who edited
The Pond,
an English-language magazine based in Berlin. Skeptical, he started me out with with some book reviews, but finally gave me a shot at covering Eastern European politics. Some people accuse me on this basis of having worked for the CIA, but the CIA-backed magazine that they're thinking of is
Encounter
. I've never been able to discover who funded
The Pond
, but there was a lot more money for magazines in those days than there is now, and it's doubtful that much or any of it came from the CIA. I wrote a great deal about the Eastern Bloc for
The Pond,
but I wrote just as often for liberal magazines about right-wing dictators all over the world; I wrote a lot attacking Big Brother back when the Reagan administration was supporting him. Maybe pursuing oppression was no kind of way to atone for Emily, but it's the one available to me. I pursued my sister, too—I tried very hard to find her—but Emily proved even more elusive than justice.

f

It was in Berlin,
on a sunny afternoon shortly after the fall of the Wall, that I saw Jersey and Miranda again. Jersey's craggy face, twenty years older than I had last seen it, immediately stuck out to me among all the other faces on Unter den Linden. It was the only face that looked American.

How did Miranda look? She didn't look like a twenty-year-old. But she looked happy.

After hesitating for a moment, I crossed the crowds to say hello. “Rothsteins!” I said, and then their eyes were on me. Had I been in a gloating mood, there could not have been a more perfect time for me to see them. The months after the fall of the Wall constituted one of the few points in history when the past seemed to lead to the future, rather than the reverse. Historians would later mark it as the end of the twentieth century, the period dominated by murderous plans to perfect the world, the “short century” of 1914 to 1989. (Time flies when you're having fun.) At the time the idea that political action could not improve the world seemed simply silly. Totalitarianism was disintegrating in Eastern Europe, and from there: the Communists in China, apartheid in South Africa, Big Brother in
REDACTED
, Castro in Cuba would all have to fall. Meanwhile, Jersey's reputation had had a bad time of it. I had kept track of his progress with some editor friends, and while there were rumors of another book—called
Onan's War
—it seemed that twenty years of work had failed to produce a manuscript. If he ever did finish, it was unlikely that anyone would care. When he was remembered at all, it was by way of dismissal (“Jersey Rothstein, an also-ran among sixties hucksters”). And I had heard from Norture, who at this point was a network correspondent and whom I ran into professionally from time to time, that Jersey's only teaching jobs since we knew him had been at community colleges. Miranda supported the family as a real estate agent, while Jersey for the most part stayed home and took care of their three children. It amused me more than it should have that Jersey was a housewife.

But I was not—mostly—in a gloating mood. “Turns out that politics isn't always useless, Jersey,” was the first thing I said, and I guess that counts as gloating. And it made me feel good to see them both look embarrassedly at their feet, humbled by my success. I had my hand out for some time, and it was Miranda who finally worked up the courage to shake it.

“Arthur,” she said. “I thought you had become a doctor.”

This turned out to be somebody else we had known at Yale.

“It's almost shockingly good to see you,” Jersey said, finally warming, though he still hadn't shaken my hand. “It turns out that it is always a relief to see people who aren't dead.”

“And speaking of not being dead,” I said, “your city is alive for the first time since you left it.”

Jersey stopped walking, and at the immense inconvenience of the many passersby, bent down toward me, sniffing in the direction of my legs to catch a whiff of the Berlin sidewalk. “How long does evil leave a smell, Arthur? Twenty years? Sixty? Or does it wash away with the next morning's shower, followed by properly applied deodorant?”

His anguish at his return was understandable, but nonetheless I took a few steps back. Miranda muttered some disapproval and yanked at him until he was standing up straight again.

“Let's not talk about Berlin,” Miranda said. “Let's talk about our children. Do you have children, Arthur?”

I replied that I didn't.

“The fall of the Wall is Arthur's child,” Jersey said.

Then they started talking about their three energetic-sounding children: karate lessons, soccer. Jersey talked about how much his son liked to play Nintendo. As always with fathers, the annoyance and pride were difficult to separate. He started to say something about Sydney's fondness for pretending to be a pirate, but Miranda shushed him.

“You don't sound much like a man averse to all connection.”

He smiled and shrugged. One could imagine a happy movie ending there, with this smile of a crotchety man bashfully accepting his family. “How is your sister?” he asked.

“Jersey,” Miranda admonished.

“You know I have a sister?”

“I
knew
your sister.”

Now it was my turn to stop walking. “What is this about?”

“We're going to talk about this. It was after you went to Europe,” Miranda said. “She called me at Smith and met me in New Haven, at Jersey's. We had a nice dinner and she slept over. She had sex with Jersey, and Jersey likes to bring it up whenever he feels like starting a fight.”

“What happened to her?” Jersey asked me.

“He's just trying to make me jealous,” Miranda said. “We should probably leave you alone, Arthur, our hotel is…”

“I don't know what happened to her,” I said. “We had a falling out just before I left, and I have no idea what's become of her since. Has she ever tried to contact you? If you know anything, I would…”

“You don't have to justify anything to us,” Miranda said. She clearly wanted to stop talking and go back to her vacation. “I think Jersey thinks of her as a great conquest or the one that got away, but really she was just a teenage girl he took advantage of a long time ago.”

“It
was
a long time ago,” I said, wanting out of this just as much as she did.

“Why do you call yourself Arthur Hunt now, instead of Huntington?” Jersey asked. “Neville calls himself Win. I thought it was Jews, not WASPs, who were supposed to change names.” Without waiting for an answer, he spit on the ground. “Morgenthau was right. They should have turned this entire country into farmland. What am I supposed to feel here? The presence of ghosts? Arthur, do you think that the fall of the Wall means anything? Do you think that this means that even one fewer body will burn?”

The entire conversation had left me, to my surprise, relieved. Whatever had happened to Emily, at least I hadn't ruined her sexual desire. Maybe she was living a happy life after all.

“You know something, Jersey?” I said. “I think it just might mean that.”

Two years later I was in Bosnia.

f

Liljana was the first
in her home to be awoken by the Serbs. She heard their truck pulling up and knew what it was without seeing the boys with machine guns heading toward the front door. Before the first knock she had taken a knife from the kitchen, she had passed by her brother's room (a year younger than Liljana, he would be useless now), and she had awoken her father and asked him to kill her. “No, Sweetheart, we will survive. We will cooperate with them, they will humiliate us, rummage through our things and steal whatever they want to steal, they will tell us that we must leave town. Tomorrow we will leave.” At this point the Serbs started knocking. “Yes, Liljana,” her mother said, rising from the bed and, for some reason, brushing her hair. “Tomorrow we will leave.” “No,” Liljana said, “they will kill us all. They will rape me. Please kill me now. I wish I could kill myself but for some reason I can't. If you love me you will do this.”

By now they could hear the Serbs knocking in the door. Her father said, “You will be safe. I have a plan to make sure we will survive.” He took the knife Liljana had brought him and put it in the pocket of his pajama bottoms. The soldiers were yelling for them to show themselves. Her father rose from the bed and took a pistol from the dresser. They could hear her brother screaming and then stop screaming. Her father took his old tattered robe from the closet—Liljana had bought him a new one the previous year but he had never worn it—and put the pistol in the robe pocket. “Your brother is not dead,” her father said. “Do not worry, Liljana. This is my plan. You will hide under the bed. When the Serbs come into the room, they will say some things to me, and then when I say the word ‘piglet' you will yell in order to distract them. Then I will take out my pistol and shoot them.” At this point a Serb came through the door and shot him in the head. The Serb looked at her and her mother, and then he got a look on his face that reminded her of the way that dumber boys looked when they were trying to solve a math problem at the blackboard. Then he shot her mother twice in the chest and took Liljana by the elbow into the living room, where four other soldiers were waiting. One of them had a gun to the neck of her brother, who was now crying loudly. Because of this he was slapped by another Serb, this one wearing a patch on his jacket that said “Top Gun!” in English. “Do not cry,” Top Gun told him, and slapped him again. This was something that Liljana also wanted to do, she wanted to slap her brother for crying. No tears for you now, she wanted to tell him. You wasted all your tears crying when you were four and dropped an ice cream cone, when you were seven and your team lost in soccer, when you were eleven and Grandma died, when you were twelve and our dog died, three weeks ago when your girlfriend dumped you. No more crying for you now. Slap him, Mister Top Gun Serb. Slap him and make him shut up. But he did not stop crying. “If you don't stop crying,” said Top Gun, “I will shoot off both of your sister's tits.”

This only made him cry more. Top Gun tore off the front of her nightgown. Then he slapped her brother again. “What is wrong with you? Why are you looking at your sister's tits? Do you want to fuck your sister? Go ahead. Fuck your sister.” Now the Serbs were laughing and her brother was sobbing like a car that wouldn't start.

“I want to live,” she said. And she did. She was only human. Everyone laughed, of course they would do nothing but laugh, but she wanted to live and she wanted to tell them that they were going to kill someone who wanted to live. Top Gun pushed her to the floor and tore off the rest of her nightgown. He struck her brother's cheek with a pistol over and over until he took off his pajama bottoms. Then he pushed her to the floor and forced her brother to molest and finally to penetrate her—which he would not have been able to do had he not been evil—while all the others laughed. “I am so sorry,” her brother said. “Please forgive me.”

“I will never forgive you,” Liljana said. “We will both be dead soon but I will hate you after the grave. I hate you more than I hate the Serbs.” He was still sobbing when he ejaculated. He was still inside of her when the Serbs shot him in the back of the head. Then two of the other Serbs pulled her brother's body away and each of the Serbs raped her before leaving her on the floor.

f

Liljana told me this
story through an affectless translator. She was seven months pregnant with the child of either her brother or one of her attackers. Assuming her story was to be believed. She had already told it to another reporter, who didn't believe her. He thought that the translator was embellishing the story, so that we would report it to the Western world (which, he said, would then have no choice but to intervene). “This is overreaching. This story is so horrible and so obviously fake that it almost passes into comedy.” This reporter hadn't been here very long. I had already heard stories of Serb paramilitary soldiers forcing fathers to castrate their sons and rape their daughters. There was a widespread campaign by Serbs to rape Muslim and Croat women in order to impregnate them with their enemy. There were even rape camps, where women would be raped sometimes for four months before being murdered or let go, depending on the whim of the people doing the raping.

When Liljana had finished her story, I took out a cigarette and out of habit offered her one. She reached for it, but the translator slapped her hand and gave me an admonishing look. I apologized and excused myself, saying I would be back in just a moment. I wandered aimlessly; it was a few minutes before I realized that I had an unlit cigarette in my mouth. I had quite distinct images in my head of the men who had done this. I was already formulating a plan of what precisely I would do when I would meet them, weighing whether it would cause them greater pain if I stuck a knife into their abdomens or if I told them to kneel down and beg for their lives prior to shooting each of them in the back of the head. Forget that there was no chance that I would ever meet them. I would have to meet them. They couldn't simply get away with it. My images of them were of a group of men in leather jackets (maybe they were Serbs and maybe not) whom I had seen in the airport when I first got here, men who I thought were laughing sinisterly over something. If I didn't meet the men who had raped Liljana and murdered her family, then maybe I would simply have to find those men I had seen in the airport and kill them. And if I could not find the men from the airport, as of course I could not, then I would find random men on the street and kill them. I would take their wallets from their pockets, wipe off some of the blood with my sleeve (for there would be blood all over and all around these men, blood would seep out of their bodies as though it were surrendering), and then I would find their surnames. I would find where they lived. Then I would kill their brothers and their fathers and their sons. Hell, I would kill the women, too, for allowing men to pass out of and into their vaginas, for allowing their vaginas to be treated as the filthy hotel lobby of the filthy awful world. To kill everyone: That was the only humane way to respond to what I was seeing in Bosnia. I had walked through a village full of the bloated corpses of men, women, and children. I had seen garbage bags full of severed human heads. I had heard reports of people being crowded into buildings and the buildings set on fire.