Hey, that’s why the great minds of the Laurentians chose me, isn’t it? They wanted someone bright, controllable, and loyal—not necessarily strong in faith but maybe just a bit weak in imagination.
The joke is, however (and it really is a terrific joke), that, because I’m just a good soldier, simple and uncomplicated, I listen to the guy I’m supposed to be spying on. And, having listened, I say, “Yeah, I see what he’s saying. This is something new. This is something really new. This guy is making sense. He’s making as much sense as I’ve ever heard anybody make. What’s the problem?”
Then the guy takes me aside and says:
Then the guy leads me halfway across the city on foot and says:
Then the guy buys me sixteen-year-old Scotch and says:
“There are some teachings that only exceptional students can handle. I hope to lay some of those teachings on you.”
I think maybe the great minds of the Laurentians should have found themselves a soldier who was not quite so good—or perhaps much better.
Of course, I’m not quite sure where I stand with B at this point. Looking back on it now, I see that I was a lot more upset by Shirin’s revelation than he was. The truth is, I was just projecting. Having been found out, I took it for granted that he’d be disgusted or disappointed. In fact, he was neither. He was amused.
Okay, I’m still not sure where I stand with him, but I don’t think I’m exactly in the trash heap. I didn’t come off looking brilliant, but I’m pretty sure I didn’t come off looking like scum.
Sunday, May 19
Radenau: Night Two
When I arrived at the Schauspielhaus Wahnfried at nine o?
??clock, I almost thought I’d come on the wrong night or to the wrong place, because the protesters were gone. Perhaps this second night of speaking wasn’t on their schedule or they thought one night at the barricades was sufficient; perhaps there was a heckler shortage at some other site. Nonetheless, the door was being guarded by a vestige of the group, an angry-looking woman passing out angry-looking flyers. I accepted one, but it was in German.
On the previous night the houselights had been turned up as if for a quick evacuation. Tonight they were turned down as if for a quiet reading. The stage was dimly lit and empty except for its speaker’s podium. There were perhaps a hundred people in the audience. Not wanting to be recognized from the stage, I took a seat well back. It was a quiet crowd, patient, subdued—a crowd of strangers and, for the most part, I thought, loners.
After a few minutes B walked onto the stage, stepped up to the podium, and began arranging papers. For a public speaker, this is just technique. After a few moments the audience registered his presence and subsided into silence. B began, as I assumed he would, at the beginning, summarizing not only the previous night’s talk but the one he’d given in Munich, extending the process of diminishing returns that he’d described at Little Bohemia. With each successive talk, this summary would grow in comprehensiveness—and proportionately diminish in effectiveness.
When he was finally ready to step off into unexplored country, he paused and looked around, gathering up everyone’s attention, and I took out my pen.*
• • •
I think that my true situation came to me then in the next forty minutes, as I was scribbling away, fiercely concentrated on hearing and on making out the words (for you can’t really hear if you don’t get the words—it all just turns into gibberish). Pious souls often imagine that being a priest automatically puts you miles ahead of everyone on the wisdom track. Listening to B, I realized that I’m not an inch ahead of anyone on that track. I’m in the dark. I’m at the beginning. For all intents and purposes, I’m still nineteen. At one point, my hand wavered, and I said to myself, “I don’t need to take this down. All I have to do is listen.” But I was sufficiently doubtful that I kept going. I’m glad I did, now, of course. At the time I felt like a man at the wheel of a sinking ship—purposeless, since any ship can find its way to the bottom.
After half an hour I also felt like a losing boxer in the eighth or ninth round of a ten-rounder. I’d been hit everywhere it’s legal to be hit—every square inch. The sentences came at me like punches, and I read them and took them in like punches. “Oh yes, there’s another one to the kidney. I remember one like that in round three.” “Oh yes, and there’s one to the biceps—that’s not supposed to hurt, but goddammit it does!” “And here comes one I was sure was going over my shoulder, but instead it caught me right on the ear.”
When it was over, I staggered outside with everyone else and planted myself across the street, assuming B would make his appearance in a few minutes. This gave me some time to think, and here’s what I thought:
I’ve been living in a sort of time capsule, or perhaps in a special ward of the hospital that hadn’t changed since, oh, the 1950s. It was a ward in which my parents and their friends would have been happy. I’m not sure what I mean by this, I’m just groping. In this ward, Glenn Miller is still cool, not as a figure of nostalgia, but as he was to my parents when they were in college. In this ward, kids have big weddings and spend their honeymoons trying to figure out what it’s all about. In this ward, they use the rhythm method and have kids when it fails. In this ward, there are no crack babies, no lunatic cults, no terrorists. In this ward, if someone happened to tune in a radio station carrying B’s talk, he would have dialed up something else—something relevant to life in the ward.
I don’t suppose I actually had these specific thoughts while I was standing outside the theater. I’m not sure a single coherent idea passed through my head, I was just standing there feeling doomed. At some point unnoticed by me, someone turned out the marquee lights and the lights in the lobby. Perhaps ten minutes passed. Finally I came to and realized that the preceding night’s pattern was not going to be repeated. B was still inside, and if I wanted to talk to him, I’d have to find him there. I slunk my way over to the dimly lit stage door and found it prepared as a smoker’s bolt-hole, a book of matches holding it open a crack. I went in, discarded the matches, and let the door close and lock behind me.
Far, far away there were voices. There was nothing unusual about them. They didn’t sound particularly happy or sad, excited or calm. They might have belonged to people discussing a housing ordinance or the end of the world. There was no way to tell, though I stood there listening through a full minute while my eyes tried to find a glimmer of light to see by.
The stage was obviously going to be more or less directly in front of me, on the other side of some unknown collection of corridors, dressing rooms, waiting areas, and finally the wings overlooking the stage area itself. Since no helpful angel was there to guide me, I began groping my way forward, and after a couple of minutes was rewarded with a glimpse of gray light to my left. It was a bare bulb hanging over a bare stage and dimly illuminating the empty auditorium.
Into the underworld
The mutter of voices was as distant as ever. I followed it backstage to the well of a circular iron staircase and descended into the darkness. I didn’t need my eyes; the steps were regular, the railing solid. I’d seen once, somewhere, a cross-section diagram of a theater, showing a first below-stage, a second, a third, and a fourth, and I remembered wondering what could be usefully stored at such a depth. Soon the klink-klunk of my footsteps was heard below, and the muttering stopped. The fourth below-stage, where the stairs came to an end, was vast and high-ceilinged. At a far end of the space, set atop boxes and tables and shelves, a hundred candles illuminated an area that looked like a living room carved out of the middle of an antiques shop.
B was seated in an armchair facing me. He waved and called out, “Don’t worry! There are no rats!” as if encouraging me to come forward. Suddenly a dozen faces bobbed up out of the flotsam to stare at me dimly from behind ancient, battered furniture, rolled-up rugs, moldy dressmaker’s dummies, rotting displays of taxidermy, towering wardrobes, stacks of books and magazines, and racks of faded costumes. B seemed to sense my self-consciousness and made my approach less awkward by explaining the absence of rats.
“The management is careful to mount a performance of King Lear at least once every second year,” he said. When he had everyone’s eyes, he went on: “‘Mice and rats and such small deer have been Tom’s food for seven long year.’ Lear, Act III, Scene 4”—as if this would make it all plain.
He gestured to a chair at his right, a wonderful old Biedermeier fauteuil with cushions of faded pale green velvet. He himself occupied an even more wonderful Regency bergere in gilt and ebony with clawed feet and handrests modeled as lions’ heads. I sat down and looked around.
There was an extravagant Directoire ottoman at my right, and Shirin was curled up at one end of it, dressed as always in tan jeans, boots, and a silk shirt (this time dark green instead of black). She was looking at me with polite interest, and I wasn’t entirely sure she recognized me. The other end of the ottoman was occupied by an intense-looking teenage girl in blue jeans and gray sweatshirt.