Trust (28 page)

So I could not decide whether Nick's lost flag were a tool of his trade too. But on account of it—because, although it was abused and torn, a painted rag, I felt somehow its optimism and lighthearted power, and imagined that it had been flung off its stick for my feet to find as a sort of glorious and healthful omen of America, of everything that was not Europe—on account of this despised swatch and remnant, I could not hate his trade, whatever it might be, and however threatening.

Although my mother had predicted worse, on the ship going home I was sick for only a day. After that my stomach made its peace with the horizon: both were unstable, but both were eager not to be noticed. The sky over the ship was tall and narrow, like a vertical tunnel or chute through which the horizon seemed to be perpetually escaping. Every twilight we heard the birds, not seeing them. Their cries were smoky, as though upon some far pyre live human babies wailed.

My mother passed the time making lists. Most of them were insipid, but some were brilliant. The longer they were, however, the more ordinary they were. She wrote down, for instance, the names of all the places outside of the United States she had ever visited, divided into three parts: 1. Capitals. 2. Cities and Towns 3. Villages, and this list was very long. So was the one cataloguing Favorite Dishes and Beverages. The smallest list of all was headed Books I Have Written. Another one, showing three items, was called Books I Intend to Write. Below this appeared the following: 1.
Moods and Memoirs of the Embassy,
by Allegra Vand, Well-Known Connoisseur. 2.
Capitalism and Communism, A World Struggle as Witnessed by a Participant,
by Allegra Vand, LL.D. ("Well," she justified this piece of imagination, "my
father
had one, a Doctor of Laws degree; it was honorary. He got it because he gave them the money to build the new Alumni House, and if I'm his heir, I suppose I'm just as entitled to call myself LL.D. as he was!") And finally, 3.
Forward the Bold Haven: A Historical Novel of Old New York,
by Allegra Vand, author of the Best-Seller
Marianna Harlow,
listed in Drilling's Famous Compilation, "Best Literature of the Masses, 1937."

"What's it going to be about?" I said.

"The novel? Oh, I'll never write another novel. It's just to round out the list. Biography, politics, fiction."

"No, I mean this," I said, pointing to Number One.

"Oh, that. That'll be about my life."

"But it's got something about an Embassy."

"Well, where do you think I expect to
spend
my life?" she retorted.

The most inspired list of all was called Celebrities I Should Like to Have Known, and Why. Among the "celebrities" were Napoleon, Catherine the Great, and Booth Tarkington, and from each she drew an admonition for herself.

Gandhi [she wrote]. Type of pure
national saint. Because would not
eat meat or drink goats' milk.
(Give up goats' milk.)

Mme. Curie. Because dedicated
scientist. (Devote more time to
Dedication.)

St. Joan. Ditto Dedication.

The Buddha. Enlightenment and
Union. (Think more of non-Matter.)

Wright Brothers. Daedalus' dream.
[This was crossed out.] Courage? [So
was this.] Poetry of the machine.
(Develop for separate list.)

"Are the Wright Brothers priests?" I inquired, putting down the paper.

"They invented the airplane, stupid. Besides, I don't think brothers are priests in the Catholic religion anyway. Fathers are. Here, give me that, I'm going to add one more."

"Was the Buddha a Catholic?" I pursued.

"Naturally not, he was a Buddhist. Now be quiet and let me think. Ssh, I need a composer—for God's sake go away. Why don't you take your game and find somebody on deck to play with—" for in an access of last-minute remorse over her arbitrary dissolution of the ENCHIRIDION, she had bought me a box of checkers and a board.

When I left her she was wavering between Stephen Foster and Wagner.

On the first-class deck I dutifully set up the checkerboard in my lap and waited for a partner. A few passengers, mostly in military uniform, strolled by, intent on the water or their cigarettes. Nearby a foreign-looking baby just learning to walk came hobbling between its mother's legs, holding her thumbs with its fists and dribbling onto its shoes; it might have been either male or female—its haircut and the shirt over its little pants gave no clue, the one being too short for a girl and the other too long for a boy. "Volódya. Volódya," crooned the mother, urging it on with gentle kicks of her knees. "Okean," she said, pointing beyond the rail, "vodá."

In an unoccupied chair next to mine someone had forgotten his sunglasses. I picked them up and looked through the wrong side of the lenses, with the ear-pieces standing out before my face, while the deck-boards turned dark green and the big jellying waves changed to grass. The black grass fled my gaze like a long, long field, shimmering and trackless. It was the middle of the night behind those glasses; I did not like it there, and leaned out to drop them down again upon their seat, but a bristly-knuckled hand reached out to intercept them, and upset the board. The checkers spilled out on my skirt and rolled away. One skittered across the deck and under the railing and into the sea, and one the baby caught on the way and put into its mouth. I had to go after them all, avoiding the legs of the walkers, who were glad enough of the diversion. There was nothing to do on the decks of that homeward-heaving ship but think where it was taking us: so the walkers walked, in the landlubber's illusion that the more they walked the sooner they would arrive. Only my mother, sticking to her cabin and missing Enoch, did not walk. It was as though she rode against the tide.

The baby cried when I opened its jaws to force out the checker; and to win it over I smiled at its mother and said, "Is it a boy or girl?" The baby bawled louder and wider at the sound of my voice so close to its face, and inadvertently spit out the checker. "Yes," said its mother, grinning silver teeth-fillings back at me, "that is you know true." So I put the last checker, wet with the baby's spittle, into my box, and was about to close the lid: but the brindled fingers slipped a coin under the cover. "That's half a dollar for you."

"What for?"

"To use instead of the piece that went overboard. It was my fault it went in but I can't tell you how to fetch it out again. This isn't an admiral's suit, you see."

I observed his buttons with modified scorn; I knew perfectly well and at first glance what sort of uniform he wore. He was a colonel. On account of Enoch I had seen many colonels, and they all dressed alike.

"Don't you have to stay in Europe?" I wondered.

"Not when there's not a war," he said, and hid behind his sunglasses the froggy skin-scallops that circled his frog-eyes. Over his speckled scalp limp rows of white thread lay stretched, trained upward from where they grew at the side of his ear; they covered his skull like a very bad wig. He hinged the knees that were concealed somewhere in the long tubes of his military trousers and sat down in the deck-chair beside me.

"Are you being retired?" I asked, imagining the greyish pits in his skin to be the accumulation of very old age.

"Nope. Just going home to get some lawyers. Then I have to come right back to Nuremberg. Do you know any riddles?"

I said I did not.

"Okay, then why does a chicken cross the road?"

I said I knew that one.

"Never mind, I've got another. What didn't come into Noah's ark in pairs?"

I gave up.

"Worms," said the colonel. "They came in apples."

"What do you need the lawyers for?" I said.

"To present the evidence. What has no legs and runs?"

"A train," I ventured.

"Nope."

"A ball."

"Nope."

"A watch?"

"Nope. Ice-cream cone on a hot day. Like that one?"

"It's all right," I said politely. "My stepfather had to go to Zürich. Is that near the place you said?"

"Different country. Your stepfather Army?"

"Nope," I said, catching on. "He sort of works for the Government."

The colonel laughed. "Don't you think the Army does too?"

"I don't know much about the Army," I admitted, remembering the three English soldiers at the border, how they had carried back the cut-down giant, the big head dangling loose.

"Neither do I. You'd make a good colonel," said the colonel. "How about the five copycats sitting on a fence? One went away, so how many were left?"

"Four," I said promptly.

"Nope. None. They all copied the first one, and that's all the riddles I ever heard of. Except the Riddle of Life. Your stepfather in refugee work?"

"He keeps lists," I answered, thinking how curious it was that my mother was also impelled, at that very moment, to keep lists. But then, while the colonel scratched the hair on the back of one hand with the straight clean nails of the other, quite as though the inadequacy of my reply had set him itching, I tentatively offered him one of Enoch's sardonic phrases: "He reclaims relatives, I think."

"Oh," said the colonel, "he brings 'em back alive?"

"I don't think alive."

"Dead?"

"I guess dead," I acknowledged, gnawing my lip with shame. I knew from my mother how ignominious Enoch's obligations were; she feared the corpses had made him taboo.

And now it seemed she was right. The colonel took off his green glasses and examined me through the mole-splattered creases ringing his light-stung eyes, damp with distaste. "Well, well," he said, "I see what you mean, the Riddle of Death. So you're Vand's daughter probably?"

"Stepdaughter," I corrected, but my head stayed down.

"Rotten job, could turn the stomach of the best of 'em. Well, it's made his name, that's the point—I suppose that's why he does it. I run into him now and again, you know." His heavy clench gripped my shoulder and then abruptly opened—I felt on me the seal of his contempt "Can't see why they brought
you
over."

I said humbly, "I came with my mother."

"Made the Paris papers, didn't she? Crashed up her chauffeur?"

"He only had a concussion."

"Only?"

"He didn't get
killed,
" I said defensively.

"That's a riddle too," the colonel remarked without a blink. "Half a mind to take back my fifty cents."

"I bet you've killed a hundred people," I accused him, "on account of being in the Army."

"A hundred thousand's more like it. But it wasn't the Army's fault It was the war's." I could think of nothing to say to this, so he explained, "The Army doesn't make the war, the Government does. The Army only does what the Government tells it to," and looked at me as though he thought I should understand. "That's what they're saying in Nuremberg; that's the defense, and I can't say I don't think they have a point. You take that Russian kid over there—" I turned to follow his nod: the baby was drooling. "Some sort of U.N. connection," the colonel went on, "but I'll tell you something: I'm more scared of that kid over there than I am of all the generals in the Nuremberg dock put together, you know why?"

I could not imagine why. The baby, reaching up for an almost-empty spool of yellow thread its mother was swinging just beyond its grasp, seemed harmless enough, if not especially intelligent; for when it captured the spool it only put it into its mouth. But I did not see why the colonel should be afraid of it.

"I heard an Arab sing a Russian song last week," I told him, thinking how my mother, with equal inexplicability, had been afraid of the singer's voice. "It was in a restaurant, but he wasn't really from Arabia."

Unimpressed, the colonel returned his big dark spectacles to his face, shutting me out of the green world there; but I could see my reflection, distorted against a background of sea, on their curved surfaces. "It's that kid we've got to watch out for, that's the generation of the real enemy. The lawyers are wasting their time. So's Vand and all the other post-war bureaucrats. What's done is done. We can't waste time going back, we've got to prepare for that kid over there." It was plain to me that he was no longer addressing me; he had grown unforeseeably formidable, and seemed incapable of riddle-making.

To placate him I recited, "They haven't paid my mother royalties since 1939."

"Who?" he sternly asked.

"The Russians."

"Royalties on what?"

I bit my fingertip doubtfully.

"I see what you mean," he conceded, although I had not spoken. "You know what royalties are?"

"No," I said.

"You're a nice little girl," the colonel said. "I like you."

"Do you want to play checkers?" I inquired at once, to take advantage of his sudden amiability.

His strong public laugh blared. "I always win against civilians, that's fair warning. It's part of my battle-plan." Between us we dared the tilt of his chair-arm, balancing the board. His furred tidy fingers lined up the checkers until he had his black squadron at attention. Methodically he charged my troops, piling the losses in a neat round red tower at his side, and shortly won. "A field situation," he described it, "it's over your head, it's not for you. You haven't learned how to calculate your advance." The pieces fell in at his command for the next game; democratically, we exchanged colors. "I've got the Red Army now, have I?" he muttered, and without conscience decimated my forces once more. "You've got to be able to see the other side's advantages, you've got to be able to anticipate them. No, I don't like the way you play—you take foolish chances, you're a wild patriot: now look, don't love your side so much you won't let yourself think about mine! Too much patriotism always loses," he concluded, and gave me a sharp smile that was not really humorous. "They shouldn't have brought you over there. Not now, not in the middle of everything."

"The middle of everything," I repeated, wondering where that was and watching, as he rose, the flash of the half dollar representing the sea-swallowed piece: it came and went in his left lens like a frantic semaphore.