Kingdom of Shadows

“Yes.”

“When was that?”

“When you weren’t there to see.”

“Oh yes? And when was that?”

“Dance with me, Nicky,” Sloth said and took him by the arm. They did something not unlike a fox-trot, and the band-Los Tres Hermanos was printed in script on the bass drum-slowed down to accomodate them. She leaned against him, heavy and soft. “Do you stay up late, when you’re here?”

“Sometimes.”

“I do. Montrouchet drinks at night, then he sleeps like the dead.”

They danced for a time.

“You’re lucky to have Cara,” she said.

“Mm.”

“She must be, exciting, to you. I mean, she just is that way, I can feel it.”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes I think about the two of you, in your room.” She laughed. “I’m terrible, aren’t I?”

“Not really.”

“Well, I don’t care if I am. You can even tell her what I said.”

Later, in bed, Cara sat back against the wall, sweat glistening between her breasts and on her stomach. She took a puff of Morath’s Chesterfield and blew out a long stream of smoke. “You’re happy, Nicky?”

“Can’t you tell?”

“Truly?”

“Yes, truly.”

Outside, the fall of waves on the beach. A rush, a silence, then the crash.

The moon was down, hazy gold, waning, in the lower corner of the window, but not for long. Cautiously, careful not to wake Cara, he reached for his watch on a chair by the bed. Three-fifty. Go to sleep. “That knits up the raveled sleeve of care.” Well, it would take some considerable knitting.

Cara was on to him, but that was just too bad. He was doomed to live with a certain heaviness of soul, not despair, but the tiresome weight of pushing back against it. It had cost him a wife, long ago, an engagement that never quite led to marriage, and had ended more than one affair since then. If you made love to a woman it had better make you happy-or else.

Maybe it was the war. He was not the same when he came back-he knew what people could do to each other. It would have been better not to know that, you lived a different life if you didn’t know that. He had read Remarque’s book, All Quiet on the Western Front, three or four times. And, certain passages, again and again. Now if we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way anymore…. Let the months and the years come, they bring me nothing, they can bring me nothing. I am so alone and so without hope that I can confront them without fear.

A German book. Morath had a pretty good idea what Hitler was mining in the hearts of the German veterans. But it was not only about Germany. They had all, British, French, Russian, German, Hungarian, and the rest, been poured into the grinding machine. Where some of them died, and some of them died inside themselves. Who, he wondered, survived?

But who ever did? He didn’t know. The point was to get up in the morning. To see what might happen, good or bad, a red/black wager. But, even so, a friend of his used to say, it was probably a good idea that you couldn’t commit suicide by counting to ten and saying now.

Very carefully, he slid out of bed, put on a pair of cotton pants, crept downstairs, opened the door, and stood in the doorway. A silver line of wave swelled, then rolled over and vanished. Somebody laughed on the beach, somebody drunk, who just didn’t care. He could see, barely, if he squinted, the glow of a dying fire and a few silhouettes in the gloom. A whispered shout, another laugh.

Paris. 15 June.

Otto Adler settled in a chair in the Jardin du Luxembourg, just across from the round pool where children came with their sailboats. He folded his hands behind his head and studied the clouds, white and towering, sharp against the clear sky. Maybe a thunderstorm by late afternoon, he thought. It was hot enough, unseasonal, and he would have looked forward to it but for the few centimes it would cost him to seek refuge in the cafe on the rue de Medecis. He couldn’t afford a few centimes.

This would be his first full summer in France, it would find him poor and dreamy, passionate for dark, lovely corners-alleys and churches-full of schemes and opinions, in love with half the women he saw, depressed, amused, and impatient for lunch. In short, Parisian.

Die Aussicht, like all political magazines, didn’t quite live and didn’t quite die. The January issue, out in March, had featured an article by Professor Bordeleone, of the University of Turin, “Some Notes on the Tradition of the Fascist Aesthetic.” It hadn’t quite the elevated depth his readers expected, but it did have the epic sweep-reaching back into imperial Rome and snaking forward past nineteenth-century architecture to d’Annunzio. A gentle, twinkling sort of man, Bordeleone, now professor emeritus of the University of Turin, after a night of interrogation and castor oil at the local police station. But, thank God, at least Signora Bordeleone was rich, and they would survive.

For the winter issue, Adler had grand ambitions. He had received a letter from an old Konigsberg friend, Dr. Pfeffer, now an emigre in Switzerland. Dr. Pfeffer had attended a lecture in Basel, and at the coffee hour following the talk the lecturer had mentioned that Thomas Mann, himself an emigre since 1933, was considering the publication of a brief essay. For Mann, that could mean eighty pages, but Adler didn’t care. His printer, down in Saclay, was-to date, anyhow-an idealist in matters of credit and overdue bills, and, well, Thomas Mann. “I wondered aloud,” said Pfeffer in his letter, “ever so gently, whether there was any indication of a topic, but the fellow simply coughed and averted his eyes-would you ask Zeus what he had for breakfast?” Adler smiled, remembering the letter. Of course, the topic was completely beside the point. To have that name in Die Aussicht he would have published the man’s laundry bill.

He unbuckled his briefcase and peered inside: a copy of Schnitzler’s collected plays, a tablet of cheap writing paper-the good stuff stayed in his desk back in Saint Germain-en-Laye-yesterday’s Le Figaro, gathered, he thought of it as rescued, on the little train that brought him to Paris, and a cheese sandwich wrapped in brown paper. “Ah, mais oui, monsieur, le fromage de campagne!” The lady who owned the local cremerie had quickly figured out that he had no money, but, French to the bone, had a small passion for seedy intellectuals and sold him what she called, with a curious mixture of pride and cruelty, cheese of the countryside. Nameless, yellow, plain, and cheap. But, Adler thought, bless her anyhow for keeping us alive.

He took the tablet from his briefcase, hunted around until he found a pencil, and began to compose. “Mein Herr Doktor Mann.” Could he do better with the honorific? Should he try? He let that sit, and went on to strategy. “Mein Herr Doktor Mann: As I have a wife and four children to feed and holes in my underwear, I know you will want to publish an important essay in my little magazine.” Now, how to say that without saying it. “Perhaps not widely known but read in important circles?”

Phooey. “The most substantive and thoughtful of the emigre political magazines?”

Limp. “Makes Hitler shit!” Now, he thought, there he was on to something. What if, he thought, for one manic second, he actually came out and said such a thing?

His gaze wandered up from the paper to the deep green of chestnut trees on the other side of the pool. No children this morning, of course, they would be suffering through a June day in a schoolroom.

A stroller in the park came toward him. A young man, clearly not at work, perhaps, sadly, unemployed. Adler looked back down at his tablet until the man stood beside his chair. “Pardon, monsieur,” he said. “Can you tell me the time?”

Adler reached inside his jacket and withdrew a silver pocket watch on a chain. The minute hand rested precisely on the four.

“It is just …” he said.

M. Coupin was an old man who lived on a railroad pension and went to the park to read the newspaper and