Part 17 (1/2)

”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 gla.s.ses 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 antic.i.p.ate 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 semaph.o.r.e.

”Europe,” he said firmly, and by the consciously severe rasp he entrusted to his tone I was immediately reminded of Enoch. ”It's no place to bring a kid any more. You tell 'em I said so.” He waited until he drew from me what he imagined was consent. Then: ”Europe's for the scavengers now, and for the lawyers,” he told me, going off.

I did not know what he meant by scavengers-he seemed to dip in and out of conversation with himself, generally in my mother's fas.h.i.+on-but when, after a yard's hesitation, he stopped to call to me to be grateful for America and to listen to my teachers (he did not again mention Enoch or my mother), I thought he must be right about the lawyers. Europe made work for lawyers: for my mother's lawyer Europe made work. In the middle of violence, in the middle in fact of everything (the colonel's phrase came clear), had she not had to send after William's strange tools of peace? Insurance would heal the chauffeur's wound, checks would surfeit the private visitor's greed; and, for both, William's techniques were as ample as my mother's trust fund. Lawyers were a cult, the colonel implied, his voice not liking them.

His walk across the deck dispelled the moment's similarity to Enoch which that vocal scorn of his had conjured-unlike my stepfather he had the military gait, the chin low, the belly inconspicuous, the flat ears subtly on guard, the utilitarian shoulders jutting at either side as sparely as rifle-racks, and soldier's legs stiff half from habit, half from some perhaps secret ailment. His whole movement signified departure-not the casual leavetaking of ordinary men who might soon come together again (as we might, and did, meet in the dining room half an hour afterward), but the hailed, paraded, pitied, and applauded embarkation, at the dock's mobbed edge, of the sacrificial armored few. He proceeded, in brief, like a man who of all things knew least whether he would return. And with just such a swerve to the side of his clipped and visored head as one would expect of a man of fate, he bent to nuzzle out the alien baby's dalliance. There against the brown rail, while the white-st.i.tched ocean bounced beyond, he squatted face to face with his enemy. And while he talked at it, sending out curling sounds between the varied jackets, foils, and crowns of his c.r.a.pulent teeth, his enemy warily re-connoitred-sucked its fingers, then swiftly, a blitzkrieg, with small fierce fists s.n.a.t.c.hed the sunshades from his nose. ”Volodya!” cried its mother; and ”Nyet, nyet,” chided the colonel, struggling to open his enemy's moist positive grip. But too late and in vain-in and out of the baby's mouth went the ear-pieces; it licked with relish, and tried its tongue up and down the smooth green lenses, and bit hard little gums, red as strawberries, joyously on the colonel's intervening hairy forefinger. ”Nyet,” said the colonel, and ”nope,” said the colonel, persuading, entreating. The woman lowered her bright braided and ribboned head into the skirmish, slapping the baby's hands to free its prize-of-war. Cautiously she squeezed its cheeks until its small tongue-tip pushed out and relinquished the colonel's nibbled finger. Then she handed him his gla.s.ses, ruefully framing signs, inserting her own fingers into her mouth and pressing her gums. ”Teething,” the colonel translated. ”You should give him something to work on.” The woman grimaced to show how well she had understood-”You see yes quite,” she stated in a voice pitched too low for English, and displayed tiny mysterious notches on the wooden spool. At once the baby grabbed it away and took it to its mouth. The colonel smiled at the mother of his enemy. ”Nice little boy, nice fellow,” he said, wiping his smeared sungla.s.ses across his breast with a sweep of complicity. Meanwhile the baby gnawed on the spool, then suddenly laughed aloud. It was a shriek of open satisfaction. Its mother patted her thickly banded circle of braid, embarra.s.sed by pleasure and pride. ”Female,” said the mother of the colonel's enemy.

I was astonished into bravery and out of politeness. ”You played with the baby,” I burst out when, not merely with the air of a man who has had an afterthought, but as something of a hero chewing the cud of his self-esteem, the colonel restored himself to the march and came to stand by the chair where I was dropping the checkers one by one into their black box. I a.s.sumed he was one of those people, easily recognized by children and almost certainly childless, who congratulate themselves on being especially attuned to the mentalities of all the inferior races. I sensed by now that it was his custom to speak to children as though he were accosting a tribe of amicable bushmen, and (supposing he had ever encountered a bushman) vice-versa: in either case he could leap from the simple to what he hoped was the profound without expecting to offend. In this, as I had already observed, he somewhat resembled my mother; but she, at least, had the virtue of not concealing, from herself or her subjects, her plain dislike. ”You said you were afraid of it,” I pointed out, ”and then you played with it.”

”It's the future I'm afraid of.” But this was too cryptic. ”I don't like to think of the future,” he finished.

”I do,” I said quickly, and thought of the future then and there-I saw a great white ring of light, and myself in the heart of it, elevating a snow-encrusted violin. For in one of her lists marked Things After Getting Home: Winter Preparation, my mother, under the ba.n.a.lity of ”school clothes,” had written ”music lessons.”

”Well, you,” the colonel said, ”you are the future.” This sounded so much like another riddle that he had to scratch his small upper lip. ”Which reminds me, let's see: some boy scouts are out on a hike,” he plunged on so earnestly I almost forgave him, ”and after a while come to a forest. Now-how far into it can they go?”

I considered. ”Are there trees?”

”Of course. I said it's a forest.”

”And wolves?”

”Plenty of wolves, but it doesn't matter.”

”Then I give up,” I said.

”Knew you would,” said the colonel, pleased by his triumph. ”Answer's halfway in.”

”Halfway?” I wondered.

”Well, because after that they're not going into the forest, they're coming out. It's the same as now,” he commented, lifting a vague salute to the sea. ”We're halfway to America.”

But though it might have been the truth, I did not think this a witticism. If we were halfway to America, then we were halfway to Europe too: it was only a question of reversing the engines; it was only a question of point of view. ”I don't see how anybody can be afraid of a baby,” I told him with more uneasiness than spite; and looked toward that part of the sky, littered with shards of clouds like broken white teacups turned upside down, under which Europe invisibly lay.