Testimony and Demeanor (4 page)

Since the complete exercise takes concentration as well as a certain amount of cunning, I was still exhilarated at my accomplished change in fortune as I served supper. This state of well-being even lasted until bedtime, although I knew that sleep would undo it. The Duc de Saint-Simon disliked the shock of a new day so much (I presume because his spirit was again stuck
down in his body) that he would not leave his bed until his valet said to him, “Get up, get up, Monsieur le Duc, you have great things to do today!” How different Acting Sergeant Shoemaker’s first words would be I did not care to imagine.

I waited until the latrine was empty and the lights were out in the squad bay before I went in to shave. I disliked rushing in the morning. As I stepped out of the latrine a blanket was thrown over my head. There was a great deal of shoving, and the noise of feet scraping on the floor. I was hit in the middle of the forehead. I gathered that a number of them were trying to beat me through the blanket, and they might have really done it had they used their fists, but, as I saw later, they were using the handles from the push brooms. There wasn’t enough room to wield them effectively, and I heard a yelp when somebody holding the blanket over me was hit. I couldn’t recognize their voices. In fact, they could have done without the bother of the blanket altogether—I doubt if I would have recognized their faces. After I recovered from the surprise, it took me very little time to break loose. I think I may have rammed one person into the drinking fountain. But as I was about to get rid of the blanket they gathered again and pushed me through the side door so swiftly that I fell heavily down the wooden steps. By the time I was on my feet again and clear of the blanket, they had scuttled back to their beds. I shook myself and padded back up the steps. I could have found them, I suppose, by their heavy breathing. The push broom handles—three of them—lay on the floor. I saw, too, that the blanket they had used was from my bed, so I had to go outdoors again to retrieve it. I folded it in half and shook the dust out of it. My hands were beginning to stiffen. They had received the few well-aimed strokes that had followed the initial one to my forehead.

I wanted to find it absurd, but my body took it as a humiliation. My forehead felt wet, although it wasn’t bleeding. My hips hurt too, from the fall. But most of all, my stiff hands trembled,
not in the fingers but from the wrist and elbow. I wanted to find the people absurd, but my fluttering arms and damp bruises took them seriously.

“Demry,” I said, “where were you?”

He rolled onto his back to face me. “You’re very big on waking me up, man. Last time I saw you, you were waking me up.”

“You weren’t scared, were you, Demry?”

“I was sleeping, man.”

“You don’t feel bad about it, do you?” I said.

“They didn’t do you no real harm, did they?”

“No,” I said. “But I hope you don’t feel bad.”

“Not me,” he said. “I was catching up on my sleep.”

I said, “Give me a boost up, would you, Demry? I’m somewhat stiff.”

He thought about that awhile. But he was essentially a helpful fellow—even kind. He got out of bed and gave me a shove up as I clambered onto the upper bunk.

I lay on my side. I knew they were there. They had reached me, and it was I that was scuttling away. They had reached my state of mind—not with their blows but with their intentions. I was protected by my own strength, by the shortness of time, even by rules and laws—I had nothing to fear physically. But I had to scuttle away, because they tore apart the pleasant distance at which I lived.

All together they made a spirit that was opaque and probably at odds with itself, but very large and probing. The irony of it was that had I been small and weak, there would have been no need for them to gather. The irony of it was also that I had been fair. But irony would not work to keep the distance. They all at once came closer to me until what had been wandering creatures on my lawn became hands and faces pressed against the windows. All the time I’d thought I could cry “Whoosh!” and they would remove themselves like a carpet of pigeons from a park sidewalk. I had been taught, of course, to
treat them better; I knew that fairness was not just a tactical consideration. What I had been taught and its manifestations, however, did not interest them; what did was my real state of mind. I think their final outburst was almost more curiosity than resentment. They probably wanted to see too.

Shoemaker came down the stairs from the cadre room, where he now lived. He shone his flashlight here and there about the room.

“All right, I want quiet,” he said. The beam lighted on Ellridge kneeling on his lower bunk, his hands clutching the hollow bars that supported the upper.

“Aren’t you going to get them?” Ellridge said to me.

“Shut up, Ellridge. You’re on KP tomorrow,” Shoemaker said. He shone the light on my face and approached. “Was it you, Bonzo?”

“Put out the light,” I said.

“Was it you, Bonzo?”

I reached out and grabbed his throat. “Put out the light,” I said. He did. “Be reasonable,” I continued, shaking him just a little, “or I’ll throttle you.” I didn’t mean it. He meant very little one way or the other. I let him go.

He retreated to the stairs and turned his light on, pointing it down. “You’re on KP too, Bonzo.”

I was glad that I hadn’t hurt him. “All right,” I said. That was reasonable of him.

I lay awake during the night. The moon was waxing again, and shining on the knob of the drinking fountain, but the air was still turbulent between the drinking fountain and me. Even though they slept, the turbulence stayed on. I didn’t recognize those same cubic yards of air. Common pasturage during the day, they now kept on that way through the night. What had been mine now coincided with what was theirs at every corner. It was as though their gathered spirit could leave indelible traces.

The next day I was entirely present. They looked curiously at me as I served the meals—at the spot on my forehead, although they knew better than I where it came from. I was entirely present, as though they had thrown a blanket of my own skin over me and pulled it tight all the way to the ground.

I
’
VE LIVED IN
W
ASHINGTON ALL MY LIFE
except for going away summers and to college. Now I work here for Health, Education, and Welfare. In a report recommending me for promotion my boss said, “Mr. McEvoy is bright but not too bright.” I got the promotion.

Before I became a dull bureaucrat, however, I was a spy. My death-defying mission was to attend the International Students’ Festival at Helsinki one summer in the late fifties. I was at Yale, and some people who were in the same college with me got in touch with me. They were the local branch of the American Students’ Union, which was sort of wishy-washy liberal, which was what I was, but they turned out to be in the pay of the government, which is what I turned out to be too. Anyway, they financed my trip over to the Students’ Festival, where I was asked to talk it up with the Russian students and make reports on who seemed especially friendly. I assumed it was so that our people could get in touch with them and maybe proposition them. I didn’t know for sure.

Of course, what happened was that the Russian students most eager to make friends were the ones who were supposed to find American students who were eager to make friends. Not too surprisingly, we found each other. By and large we were the only ones who could afford to buy drinks for anybody else. We were very popular at the local taverns—well-behaved, affluent, cheerful. I suppose we did something for the local tavern industry of brave little Finland. I got the impression they’d never had it so good, so it was foreign aid if nothing else.

On the tenth day, one of the friendly Russian students took me aside. At that time I still lingeringly thought I might make a contact, so I got quite excited. He said (he spoke pretty good English), “My friend, we are having a very good time.”

“Yes,” I said.

“I also,” he said. “But I am not sure how we should say it in our reports.”

“Our what?” I said. “Do you mean …?”

Looking at his face then, I lost a preconception. I’d thought that the Russians had been somewhat maligned in our popular press, but I’d believed the part that made them out to be pretty crude from the point of view of being cool. The Russian smiled. “Ah,” he said, “I am a very bad man.”

I couldn’t help laughing.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Let us simply continue.”

“Or continue simply,” I said. This took him a while to get, which was what I hoped, so he wouldn’t have the better of me totally. Cheap and stupid of me.

We spent more and more time together, and he never brought the subject up again. We talked about Billie Holiday, Jack Teagarden, Sidney Bechet. I suppose that’s the great cliché about Russian students now—that they are as enthusiastic about jazz musicians as grade school kids here are about baseball players. They have a crooning reverence in their voices as they go through a litany of the all-time greats.

My friend’s name was Pavel. “Call me Paul,” he said. I did until I figured out he didn’t mean it. He took a sort of bearishly playful pleasure in adopting the clumsier manners of the Friendly Student Set.

All in all, we did have a very good time. The only Communist students who were nasty to me were the French. But they were nasty to Pavel too. They called him a bourgeois revolutionary, the “revolutionary” being ironically rather than historically intended. Oddly enough, I got mad on his behalf at that. I said I thought he was “the real thing,” whether they or I liked it or not. It was one of those moments of vehement, loud naivete that still make me twist with embarrassment. Fortunately Pavel persuaded me to leave before I’d really waded in and said a few words about how useless France was during World War II. I had planned, too, to make them feel puny by quoting the Russian war-casualty statistics on Pavel’s behalf. When I told him all this right after we left the French, he
pointed out that neither of us had much to do with those statistics.

“The only way to win arguments like that is to be dead,” he said. “That is all that has a chance to impress them. And even that … As for your ‘real thing,’ the ‘real thing’ is not a person. The ‘real thing’ that you mean is a romance, the ‘real thing’ that they mean is a theory, and the ‘real thing’ I think of is a machine.”

“No,” I said, still aroused to a lofty pitch of loyalty to friends and therefore to all human beings. “People are much more important.”

“Oh, I mean people,” he said. “People like you and me.”

But I was sure that besides being embarrassed by what I’d said to the French students, he’d also been touched that I’d been ready to go to bat for him. We went off and used some more of our expense accounts to buy drinks for ourselves and some Africans who turned up.

The summer passed. We said goodbye. I went back and finished college. I decided not to go right into law school. I decided I should work for one year at something that was indisputably good and got a job at H.E.W.

Three years later I was still there, even though I was, if not bored, at least physically restless. One day I sat down in the cafeteria in the basement of my office building, with my Salisbury steak and jello, and looked for the nine hundredth time at the Ben Shahn life-in-America murals. They’re not bad—it’s just that they weren’t meant to be looked at nine hundred times. It was my own fault. I discovered I couldn’t face another Salisbury steak and jello there. I went out for a walk.

I got as far as the huge concrete statues of heroic workhorses being controlled by huge concrete heroic workmen. They’re right beside the Federal Trade Commission, across the street from the National Gallery. I tried to imagine the 1930s
spirit that erected them. I was suspicious. My own devotion to service (I really do think H.E.W. is indisputably good) is so blue-button-down-collar and nine-to-five and progress-charts that I find it hard to conceive of the W.P.A. artist chipping away while his inner eye is on a personal vision of a new nation and a better world. Moreover, it would be sad to think that all he came up with was the concrete workhorses. And yet I find it sad, too, to think he was like me, just doing it because it was a job that was better than what most people were doing. That was my only claim to being in any way élite—that, in a high-school-civics-course frame of reference, I was a federal workhorse.

At that moment I saw Pavel. He’d seen me first. He looked very energetic and pleased. It struck him as very funny to come upon me, and he kept on grinning and pounding my shoulder. It took me until after we’d sorted out the details of how the two of us had ended up right there to feel as exuberant as he did.

He was working at the Soviet Embassy. He’d been there for some time. As cultural attaché and with some other duties. I told him what I was doing. I was surprisingly glad to see him too. We went off to have lunch at a seafood place.

“This is a very strange city,” he said. “I have a very strange feeling that everyone will leave tomorrow. That everyone is here only for a moment. I can’t believe that people are born here.”

I felt I had a choice between two answers. One was that seventy-five percent of the population hadn’t been born here. And other statistics. The other answer was that I had.

“It seems like Potemkin villages,” he said. “Like Hollywood made it for making films. I can’t find its core. However,” he added, “I am not completely lost. There are details that are familiar, that are similar.”

“Like what?”

“Those statues where we saw each other. They could be in a metro station in Russia. Except perhaps we would have
machines in place of horses. But still—something crude and powerful. And the Indians in their—” He made a circle around his head with his finger.

“Turbans.”

“—turbans, coming to get degrees in engineering, or asking for money, food, dams. I don’t mean to condescend,” he said. His English had got even better. “But they are similar, here and there,” he went on. “And you and I are similar details.”