Exiles in the Garden (31 page)

I wouldn't worry about it. Your war was an elective.

I don't worry. I used to worry. And "missing an opportunity" is not exactly what I mean. What I did was not a business decision. Alec was silent a moment, and then he added, There's a sort of shame attached.

Andre rolled his eyes but said nothing.

That must be it. What else would it be?

That accounts for your—uneasiness?

You went, Alec said. You went without a second thought.

Andre sighed heavily. You refuse to listen, he said. I have been trying to say to you that we had no choice. I could not stand aside. My country was invaded. All the countries around me were invaded. Central Europe was disappearing. Try please to understand what that means. Your world is vanishing before your eyes without the slightest indication that anything you do will reverse the tide. Stop the rot. Make it cease. So you went to war and learned how to do it in the way that a carpenter learns how to make a chair. An artisan's work. But also you are free and whatever else your life may be, it is not still. I can see you are troubled. But I cannot help you.

So it was personal, Alec said.

Andre's reply was swift. What else would it be?

Alec had left his eyeglasses off all this time. Now he replaced them and reached into his pocket for the Leica. Andre was relaxed in his chair, gently rocking, watching Vincent the postman work the opposite side of the street. This was an untroubled neighborhood, mature shade trees lining the streets, the hum of the city inaudible, spring turning slowly into summer. Even the rain was benevolent. Alec thought the street with its picture-perfect plant life and settled houses had the aspect of a film set, something from the conformist 1950s, a balalaika from an upstairs bedroom, Vincent the postman bursting into song as he danced from lawn to lawn. Alec thought, Time to leave this neighborhood to itself. He was an intruder.

Alec looked around him, at the porch with its heavy railing and the empty room behind the window. Andre stirred and said something unintelligible; he was talking to himself in Czech. Alec took a last sip of Turkish coffee and rose heavily, his knees hurting. He looked at his watch and saw that he had been sitting on the porch for almost two hours. Alec turned to say something to Andre but the old man's eyes were closed, his hands flat on his belly, fingers linked. Whatever dream he was having was peaceful, and even in repose his body had the hardness and everlastingness of permafrost or one of those solemn statues of Stalin that once stood in the squares of middle European cities. And then it occurred to him that he was not the intruder in this peaceable neighborhood. Andre Duran was. Alec stepped quietly off the porch and came around the lawn to face Andre head-on. He made two shots with the Leica, the shutter's click as quiet as the tick of a clock.

Alec turned his back and walked across the lawn to his car. As he opened the door he looked up to the rooftop of Goya House. Someone was standing on the widow's walk, still as a statue, dressed in a yellow oilskin slicker and a gardener's floppy hat. Alec recognized him as one of the soccer fans, looking now for all the world like a distressed widow scanning the horizon for signs of a ship's sail. Alec gave a wave but the figure on the roof took no notice. He looked due east, his hands gripping the flimsy railing, his concentration complete. Rain continued to fall and somewhere behind it Alec heard the balalaika's song.

He was in no rush. Alec turned the ignition of his car but did not drive away. He sat quietly looking at the great mercantile hulk of Goya House, lights visible here and there from the windows of the upper floors. Alec thought of it as a cathedral, with all the dark places and mystery of a cathedral, empty in midafternoon. He was certain now that he and Andre would not meet again. Their conversations had reached a dead end, and there was this: Andre's voice had changed when he spoke of Spain, his tone softer, almost feminine. Alec wondered if the heroic wish had given voice to the thought, a feat of the imagination. For one of Andre's generation Spain was a grail, the ur-struggle of the previous century. To be present there was to be present at the creation. Of course there were gaps in Andre's memory, things omitted or forgotten, glossed over, redacted and invented. Memories bore the same relation to the facts as distant cousins to a common grandfather. Yet was it not also true that the myths one lived by were the real stuff of life, its romance and surprise? Certainly the way one saw a much-loved grandfather was not the way he saw himself. Every life was subject to misapprehension; people saw what they wanted to see. The dance floor turned as the dancers waltzed. So stories were told to give a context to things. To give voice to the unspeakable. The listener either believed the account or did not. Often you hid your own face to see clearly the face of another. Alec believed Andre, and if he had a reservation about Spain, the reservation was unimportant. And Alec was sure Andre would say the same of him, with a reservation of his own. But what that reservation was, Alec could not say. Either way, Alec knew he was finished here. He listened hard for the balalaika but heard nothing. The figure in the yellow oilskin had vacated the widow's walk. Evidently the ship was not yet in view, so he had given it up. No doubt he would return at dusk or early the following morning and for as many days as was necessary.

As Andre said, you do not have the luxury of being certain about things, least of all the context of your own life.

H
IGH HOUSE WAS BUILT
on a bluff that looked across Baylor's Harbor to a lighthouse. There were many smaller islands round and about, and at nine and twelve and three and six the high-bowed ferry arrived from the mainland; last boat off was at nine
P.M.
It had been years since Annalise had been in Maine and she had forgotten how green it was, everything green and black-green with spots of yellow in the underbrush and on the surfaces of rocks. Maine was untamed. The house was a decade old and built on the margins of a forest, clear-cut looking south to provide a panorama of Baylor's Harbor and the open water beyond. A lone spruce stood dead center fifty yards out for perspective. The branches were widely spaced and bare to the tips, where nests of needles flourished. In early morning the nests of needles resembled floating islands, islands of the sky because their branches were obscured by fog. Now and then a gull floated out of the fog to appear on one of the branches. Except when the wind died, Baylor's Harbor and the thoroughfare beyond was alive with boats, some large, some so small that from the house you could see only the wake, a string of white on blue. At dead calm there were flat stripes in the water, gray in color and steely white where the flat spots were, a function of hidden ocean currents. At dead calm the ocean did not move at all, the only sensation that of depth and tremendous weight. Then, the water seemed to have an ominous potential behind an uneasy truce, the sense that in an instant and without warning the water could begin to heave and swell with who knew what consequences. Annalise and Alec looked up often from their books to watch the unsettled motion of Baylor's Harbor, judging the wind and looking to the west and southwest where the weather came from. Alec remarked that John Singer Sargent claimed that when he showed his portraits to members of his family, one of them always observed, Well, y-yess, but isn't there something wrong about the mouth? Baylor's Harbor was like that. Something wrong about the lay of the water.

High House (as it was called by everyone on the island) had a bedroom and bath on the first floor, a kitchen, pantry, and dining room on the second, and a living room on the third. The ceiling of the third floor was twenty feet high. The wall facing south had six high windows and a door leading to a narrow deck. The other walls were windowless, lined with bookshelves accompanied by a ladder hung on a rail attached to the ceiling. The owners had no interest in the island's interior and did not want to look at it. Their passion was the water, Baylor's Harbor and the thoroughfare beyond. Alec estimated there were more than two thousand books in the room, books of a certain age and character: three full shelves of mysteries and thrillers, McDonald, MacDonald, Cain, Hammett, and Chandler; Erskine Childers, Maugham, le Carré, McCarry; and elsewhere, floor to ceiling, Wodehouse, Waugh, John Wheeler-Bennett, Carlyle, Gibbon, Laxness, O'Hara, Charles Bracelen Flood, Mrs. Wharton, Mrs. Gaskell, Trollope, Don Marquis, Austen, Dostoyevsky, Edmund Wilson, Robert Frost, Yeats. The bottom shelves were for the children, full sets of the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew. The deck girdled the third floor but it was rarely used because the planks were not secure, well weathered with symptoms of rot, the ground forty feet down. On a low rise behind and aslant of the lone spruce was a squat cabin painted in now faded red and white stripes, a folly of the neighbors, transported log by log from Norway—Arctic Circle Norway, a fisherman's shack intended as a playhouse for the grandchildren until colonies of wasps nested. Heroic and continuing efforts to expel the wasps were unsuccessful. The interior of the cabin had not been entered for many years, so it sat untended and unoccupied, derelict.

In May the air was chilly, a biting wind most frequently from the west. The air was filled with seaweed and brine, bracing so long as you bundled up. The hills of the mainland were often obscured by low clouds that broke in the early evening, providing a spectacular sunset, a brief entertainment for the cocktail hour. Alec and Annalise took long walks in the morning and again in the afternoon; the rest of the time they read or played dominoes in the living room, conscious always of the weather and aware when a car or pickup truck motored by on the road to town. A Herreshoff came with the house, but Alec was wary of the tides and the unpredictable spring wind so he let the boat rest on its mooring, waiting for a sunny day with a benign breeze. Annalise thought the boat too small for two people, but Alec said it would be fine; the first good day they'd take it for a sail to the beach on the western side of the island, the one with sand instead of rocks and boulders the size of a small coupe. A good place to picnic, Alec said, a beach in the lee of the wind.

In the morning they walked the two miles into town for breakfast and it was then, on their third day, that Annalise announced that the script she was reading was junk.

Just awful, she said.

Send it back, Alec said.

It's work, Annalise said. I like to work. I enjoy the set. And the director and cinematographer are old friends. Best yet, they're shooting in Key West. Next winter, even better.

Who are you playing?

A whore with a heart of iron.

You've been there before.

I know. But I've always had fun in Key West. You could come with me, make some photographs of the filming. You've been idle for too long. It's not good to stay away from your craft, you lose your touch.

Alec did not reply. He was watching a red-tailed hawk circle the lighthouse, making great wide circles, riding the wind. He took the Leica from his pocket and squeezed off a shot, knowing the hawk was too far away. He lowered the camera and took one of Annalise in full pout.

You're distracted, she said. You were distracted last night in bed.

I was, that's true.

Most unlike you, she said.

Too much wine, he said.

Nonsense. Your mind was elsewhere.

Goya House, he said.

What's Goya House?

Alec had not told Annalise of his encounter with Andre Duran. He had not mentioned Lucia, either, because Annalise did not like her and was vocal about it. They had never met but Annalise had formed her own stubborn opinion, a matter of loyalty to Alec. Most hesitantly he described lunch with Lucia and Mathilde and his visits to Andre. He confessed he had been fascinated and unsettled by their conversations. He and Andre had led utterly different lives, opposing lives, you could say. Andre's was very far from a normal life. His was a life you read about in books, the ones with lurid covers. Of course their circumstances were different but Andre's experiences had given him standing along with an ardent sincerity that in another setting—say, the men's bar of a downtown club or a political rally or pulpit—would have translated into smug. He had presence, Alec said, built like an ox, brimming with energy, behaving like a man thirty years younger. Andre Duran was startlingly forthcoming. And he had been through terrible times, committing, by his own account, unspeakable acts. Probably a clever prosecutor could make him out a war criminal and Andre would not be a convincing witness in his own behalf, contemptuous as he was of any jurisdiction beyond himself. Remorse was not in his nature. In that way, Alec said, he reminded me of my father. Those in the arena lived by the arena's rules, always opaque to outsiders. Of course Andre was on the right side of things generally, a righteous warrior in the common struggle. His own experiences were the only experiences he trusted. Your experience or mine was off-book, not quite real to him. They did not exist for him and in any case were more or less expendable or valueless, like civilian casualties, collateral damage. Hard to know what to make of a man who so completely lived inside himself. Whatever private sorrow that went along with such a life was unknown, at any event unexplained. I believe he felt himself driven by fate. He had no say in the matter, assuredly a convenience in assessing the life he had led; he did what he did because he could do no other and left the assessments to strangers who were, naturally, unequal to the task. He was handed an assignment and he completed the assignment, no questions asked. Andre Duran was a locomotive on rails and the locomotive was called History. Alec said that his encounters with Andre had caused him to look critically at his own life, where assignments did not figure. What he found there was puzzling, an enigma. When he tried to remember his ambitions for himself when he started out he found he could not except for a vague desire to record daily life, its fundamental stillness, its pauses and silences and unexpected rewards. "Vague" was probably the wrong word. The correct word was "incomplete." You could not know everything about your own life or the life of anyone else. Surely there was a lesson somewhere in Andre's life and everyone had a secret store, a habit, of sorrow. Alec regretted nothing. Regret was not in Alec's nature.