The Crime of Julian Wells (5 page)

Part II

The Eyes of Oradour

6

”I can’t stop thinking about Julian,” I told Loretta.

She’d come into the city as she always did on the anniversary of her son’s death. He’d loved Central Park, and during the earlier stages of his illness, before he’d been confined to a wheelchair, they’d sometimes come here to sit and watch passersby, and even from time to time, when he’d still been able to do it, to stroll around the pond, as Loretta and I were now doing.

“It feels like I’m always in the presence of an unquiet ghost,” I added as we walked over to a nearby bench and sat down.

“Well, he was unquiet, that’s for sure,” Loretta said. “Usually he came home quite tired, but this time was different. It was as if some vicious little animal were clawing around inside him.”

I glanced out into the park, where scores of strollers were making their way along its deeply shaded paths. “My mind keeps bringing things to the surface. Little bits of memory that swirl and coalesce and pick up other little bits.”

She clearly saw the troubling aspect of this. “What little bits?” she asked.

“That dedication in his first book, for example,” I said. “That I was the ‘sole witness’ to his crime.” I shrugged. “I don’t remember witnessing any crime. I thought he meant his writing of the book, which I’d advised against. But now, I’m not so sure that that’s the ‘crime’ Julian meant.”

This last remark clearly connected to something in Loretta’s mind.

“You know, it’s strange, but for all the dreadful acts Julian wrote about, I don’t think he ever witnessed a crime of any sort.” Her gaze drifted over to one of the great gray stones of the park, children scooting down its smoothly rounded surface. “I wonder how he would have reacted if he’d ever actually seen an atrocity like the one at Oradour.” She looked at me. “Psychologically, he might not have been able to survive it. Primo Levi killed himself, remember? Tadeusz Borowski, too.”

“But they were the victims of a great crime,” I reminded her. “Not people who had done some awful thing. They didn’t die of guilt. They died because they were unable to bear the suffering they’d seen.”

“Well, Julian had certainly seen plenty of suffering,” Loretta said. “But I don’t think that was the source of his agitation.”

“Then what was?” I asked.

Loretta remained silent for a time, thinking something through. Then she said, “Julian and I were sitting in the yard at Montauk a few days before he died. I looked over at him. Looked closely at his face. There were these deep lines. And his eyes looked sunken. I said, ‘You know, Julian, the crimes you’ve written about are carved into your face.’”

Loretta was right. Julian’s features did seem to bear the imprint of Cuenca and Oradour, the castle ruins of Brittany and
C

achtice, the bleak wastes of the Ukraine.

“His response was strange,” Loretta said. “He said, ‘No, only the one I’ll never write about.’”

As if once again on that rainy street, I saw Julian turn up his collar, pull down his hat, and wave me under the awning of a small store on Avenida de la Republique
.
He’d grasped my arm fiercely, then asked if I’d heard from Marisol.”

“Do you suppose it could have been Marisol’s disappearance?” I asked. “I mean, he was looking at a map of Argentina, after all.”

“I suppose that could have been the crime,” Loretta said.

“But what would keep him from writing about that?” I asked.

Loretta’s look reminded me of a fictional detective in some old noir classic.

“Did Julian love her?” she asked.

“No,” I answered. “He cared for her, certainly. But he didn’t fall in love with her.”

“Did you?”

“No,” I said.

With that answer, I heard Marisol’s voice again:
Our time on earth is divvied out like stolen things, a booty of nights and days.

“But there was something compelling about her,” I added.

“That Julian saw?”

“Yes, of course,” I said. “And he did everything he could to find her. But people simply vanished in those days.”

Vanished, yes, I thought, but why had she vanished? For me, this had always been the mysterious part of Marisol’s disappearance, that it had remained so thoroughly unaccountable. Her body had never been found, and thus it was unlikely that she’d been the victim of an ordinary murder. But neither would she have been a likely target of the country’s political repression. What had she done, after all, except work as a guide and study dress design and occasionally express some opinion about a writer or a style of dance? Of all the people I had ever known, she had seemed to me the most innocent.

“The thing about Marisol,” I said, “is that she wasn’t at all political. She was smart and ambitious, a hard worker. She had a way about her, a knowingness, but in every other way, there were thousands like her in Buenos Aires at that time.”

“Thousands who were like her but who didn’t disappear,” Loretta said.

I nodded. “Yes.”

With that answer, there seemed little to do but change the subject.

“Anything more from René?” I asked.

“Yes,” Loretta said. “An e-mail, if you can believe it. I never met him, but Julian’s description didn’t suggest a man who’s ever been computer savvy.” She looked somewhat puzzled. “He wasn’t at all surprised by Julian’s death. That he killed himself. René likes to use English phrases. He said Julian was ‘a burned-out case.’”

Suddenly, I felt somewhat like one myself, a man who’d lost his wife to disease and his friend to suicide, both irreplaceable, a childless man whose father would soon be passing, a man with a small apartment who practiced a dying profession.

I tried to shrug off the darkness that settled over me with these thoughts. “So, what else did René say?”

“He wanted to know what he should do with Julian’s stuff,” Loretta answered. “Whatever he had in his apartment.”

The thought of René rifling through Julian’s possessions struck me as profoundly wrong. Should it not be someone else, someone close to Julian, who did this? These were the personal possessions of a very private person, after all, a man I’d loved and whose work I’d admired and with whom I’d traveled some small portion of the world.

“Would you mind if I did it?” I asked Loretta.

She leaned back slightly. “You mean go to Paris?”

I nodded. “René will just throw everything into the garbage,” I said. “And somehow that just doesn’t seem the right end for Julian’s things.”

Loretta smiled softly. “You truly loved him, didn’t you?” she asked.

A fierce emotion stirred in me.

“I did, yes,” I said. “And more than anything, Loretta, I wish I could have been with him in that little boat.”

“I’m going to Paris,” I told my father the next day.

The two of us were sitting at the small breakfast table over morning coffee.

“I need to go through Julian’s things,” I added.

It surprised me that in response to this, my father abruptly sank directly back to his own past.

“I never got to travel much in my job,” he said quietly, then drew in a long breath and released it slowly, “but I did find myself at the Nile Hotel once. In Kambala. Idi Amin was still in power in those days.”

Something in his recollection of that time clearly pained him, but he faced it bravely and went on.

“Everybody knew that Amin had several suites in the hotel,” he said. “Some were for his whores. Others were torture chambers.”

It was the latter rooms he appeared to visualize now, and I found myself seeing them, too: walls splattered with dried blood, a straight-back chair, a naked lightbulb hanging from a black cord, a metal table fitted with drains. Hell is not other people, I thought, in opposition to Sartre’s famous line; it is what we do to other people.

“I was at the hotel when he put Archbishop Luwum on trial there,” my father continued. “I tried to get my superiors to intervene, but they said it was none of our affair, and besides, dreadful as Amin was, he was no different from others. ‘The Africans don’t have presidents,’ one of them told me. ‘They have chiefs.’ Mobutu said that, too, by the way, as justification for his own slaughters.” He shrugged. “Well, Amin charged Luwum with smuggling guns, if you can believe that, and tried him out in the open, African-style, in the courtyard of the hotel. He’d filled the place with his rabble of soldiers. They were drinking whiskey and chewing khat, and they kept screaming, ‘Kill him! Kill him!’ Luwum just stood there, not saying a word, just staring that fat, whoremongering Kakwa thug right in the eye.” His gaze intensified and bore into me. “That’s what Julian should have looked for and written about, Philip,” he said. “Men like Luwum. Men who were doing some good in the world.”He shrugged. “Julian’s tragedy is that he only looked at the dark side, and it weakened him and made him sick.”

My father had never indicated such qualms about Julian’s work, so it had never occurred to me that he thought it so misdirected.

“In my opinion, it’s the good people who deserve to be written about,” he added softly.

This called into question the whole of Julian’s work, how relentlessly dark it had been. I recalled an article on bastinado he’d once written, the beating of the feet, its different names,
falanga, falaka,
where and when it had been practiced, and with what instruments. He’d even meticulously described the physical structure of the feet, the large number of small bones, the nerves that cluster in the soles, how painful it must be to suffer such assault.

My father shrugged. “But that was Julian,” he said in a way that made it clear he had no intention of dwelling further on the grim nature of his books. “So you’ll be going away.”

“For a little while,” I said. “But I’ll stay in touch. With Skype, we can even see each other. And if anything . . . comes up, I can fly back in no time.”

“Of course,” my father said, though he was clearly reticent to see me go, feeling vulnerable as old people inevitably do.

“I have to do this, Dad,” I said.

My father smiled, then reached over and touched my hand. “I can see that,” he said. Something inexpressibly sad drifted into his eyes. “It’s a good thing to have a mission.”

I considered all the futile missions my father had undertaken. He’d worked for fresh water in lands ravaged by cholera, for regional clinics in jungle redoubts, for irrigation in regions made barren by drought. In every case, as he’d long ago admitted, he’d been thwarted by the “big picture” at the State Department, global strategies of containment, domino theories, the specter of mutually assured destruction.

“Yes,” I said, then changed the subject, and for the next hour or so we talked of old films he’d watched on television lately. In addition to Westerns and spy movies, he’d begun to watch the noir movies of the forties, Humphrey Bogart and Alan Ladd, and when he spoke of them I could hear a strange longing in his voice, his old desire to be a man of action still pursuing him and accusing him and tainting his memory with failure.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” I asked in hopes of stopping the downward slant of his mood.

“No,” my father answered. He seemed to go deep inside himself, then return slowly, like a diver resurfacing. “It’s the dusty people, Philip, too small for us to notice,” he said, “the little dusty people who bear the brunt of our mistakes.”

His mood was quite obviously descending, so I gently urged him toward his youth, and for the next few minutes he talked rather nostalgically about his own father, then his college years, then about my mother, who, like my own wife, had died before her time.

“You should be getting home now,” he said at last. “I could go on for hours.”

“Yes, I probably should,” I said.

My father looked like one who’d once been offered a mission not unlike my own, but had either refused it or failed to achieve it. “Good luck,” was all he said.

7

There is no substitute for meaning, and the luckiest of us are those who have felt the spur of a grave commitment. I couldn’t possibly include myself among the men who hung in dark frames from the walls of my father’s apartment. They had been warriors and diplomats, and a few, as my father had once reluctantly admitted, had been spies. I knew that my own life would never be as charged with mission as theirs. Even so, that map of Argentina, the grim fact of Marisol’s disappearance, and finally Julian’s curious mention of some crime I had witnessed—
his
crime—had joined together to provide a purpose to my going to Paris that was larger than any I had known in a long time.

This purpose was still in my mind when I got back to my apartment.

I poured a glass of brandy, took my usual seat at the window, and looked out over the park, a glance into the night that loosened the bonds of recollection, and took me back to Berlin with Julian more than twenty years before.

He’d gone there in an effort to track down and interview some of the surviving German soldiers who had massacred the villagers of Oradour-sur-Glane in June of 1944. He had decided to write an account of this atrocity, and on the train from Paris to Berlin, he’d gone through its terrible details.

He was twenty-seven at the time, and although we had regularly exchanged letters, it had been well over a year since I’d seen him. By then, a certain texture had been added to him by his travels and his studies, and his voice bore a gravity that I associated with the knowledge and experiences he had accumulated since last we’d met.

“So, how is the new book coming?” I asked him.

“Oradour is hard to write about,” he said.

His eyes were still blue, but their shade seemed deeper, though I doubt their color had actually changed. Still, there was an incontestable depth in those eyes, something that spoke of the charred village whose tragedy he had chosen as the subject of his next book.

“Yes, it was terrible what happened at Oradour,” I said.

“I don’t mean that it’s hard to write about in that way,” Julian said. “It’s that there’s a kind of voyeurism involved, a peep-show quality.”

I looked at him, puzzled, and at that instant, the train entered a tunnel that threw us into shadow, so that we sat in silence, rumbling on, until the train passed out of the darkness and we were bathed in light again.

Something in Julian’s face had changed. It was as if, during the brief darkness of the tunnel, some other, deeper darkness had fallen upon him.

“The pain of others should not be made thrilling,” he said softly. “There should be no intellectual sadism in reading about Oradour.”

Had that been the moment when it first occurred to him to write his book as he’d later written it? I wondered now.

One thing was clear: In
The Eyes of Oradour,
Julian had focused exclusively on the victims, all 642 of them, each given a single page to bear witness, a kind of
Spoon River Anthology
for the members of that murdered village. That was the magisterial oddity of the book, the way Julian had managed to see the massacre through the eyes of those who’d suffered it. To write of the atrocity at Oradour in so strange a way had been a brave choice, and at times—when a little girl used her own body to shield her doll from the attack, for example—he had brought a heartrending vividness to the victims’ deaths.

But in that same narrative, he’d refused to name either the men who ordered the massacre or those who carried it out. Even as unnamed figures, the Germans are glimpsed only at quick moments when the crowd breaks and the back of a soldier, or perhaps only a boot or uniformed leg, is glimpsed in what amounts to a photo flash. At other times the soldiers are disembodied voices, shouting commands or gently deceiving the villagers of Oradour as to their real intent. In other instances, they appear only as the blurry hint of a figure, a brushstroke of helmeted gray.

On the whole, I thought the book extraordinarily accomplished, worthy of the many years it had taken Julian to write it, though a few reviewers had complained that he had concealed the methodical human agency behind the massacre too much, making the innocent of Oradour seem less like the victims of actual cruelty than of the touching down of a storm.

At the time, even though I greatly admired the book, I also thought this criticism not altogether unfair. It was a monumental crime, after all, and Julian had determinedly concealed the men who had carried it out.

Why had he done that?

We were sitting on a bench behind the great library on Fifth Avenue when I posed that very question. It was winter, and we were both wrapped in our overcoats. It had snowed the day before, and the bare limbs of the trees were laced in white. Julian remained silent for a long time before explaining why he hadn’t identified any of the German soldiers. “They deserve to be forgotten,” he said, as if shielding the murderers had been one of the book’s metaphorical devices. “It’s the innocent who deserve to be remembered.”

“But don’t you think the perpetrators need to be remembered, too?” I asked.

He turned to me and something in his eyes told me that this was a subject that pained him.

“What would be the point of telling some little boy that on a particular day, in a particular place, his father was complicit in a terrible crime?” he demanded. “What good would come of it?”

“But otherwise the father would get away with it,” I answered. “And a man who does a terrible thing should be identified.”

Julian gave no response, so I hammered home the point.

“Like whoever killed Marisol,” I added because the unsolved crime of her disappearance suddenly occurred to me. “He got away with it.”

One of Julian’s gloved hands wrapped around the other. “Yes,” he muttered.

He seemed so abruptly moved by the mention of Marisol that I quickly added, “You did your best to find her, Julian.”

Then, to change the subject, I glanced at the book peeking out from the pocket of his coat.

“What are you reading?” I asked. He drew the book from his pocket and I looked at the title, quite surprised by what I saw.

“Eric Ambler, I see. So, you’re reading spy fiction now?”

“It helps to pass the time,” Julian said.

“Betrayal and false identities,” I said jokingly. “People who are not what they appear. Thrilling stuff,” I added with a laugh, “but not the stuff of great literature.”

“
You might be surprised,” Julian said softly. “Life is a
shadow game, after all.”

I absently opened the book and saw that he’d underlined its most famous line. “It’s not who fires the shot,” I read, “but who pays for the bullet.”

He removed the book from my hands and returned it to his pocket. “It helps to pass the time,” he repeated. “And I don’t read Borges anymore.”

Borges, I thought, and felt the dust of the Chaco settle over us once again, a place I’d never seen, but which our guide had called home.

Borges.

A sure sign, I knew, that Julian’s mind remained on Marisol.