walked backward in time and stumbled on Versailles as it had been in 1789.”
Kasatkin was staring at Dilman. “Surely, my friend, you give no belief to that story?”
At once, Dilman felt foolish. Here he was speaking to the hardheaded, materialistic graduate of the Moscow Industrial Academy, the boss of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party, the dictator of 280,000,000 people, with whom he had spent nearly a week discussing trade agreements, ballistic missiles, outer space, Baraza, Berlin, India, Brazil, peace and coexistence, and here he was telling him a psychical experience as if it were as real as the issues over which they had debated. Kasatkin must think him mad or drunk or, worse, a moron. Dilman’s instinct was to puncture the tale good-naturedly and change the subject, but his loyalty to Nat Abrahams and to Nat’s intelligence, imagination, curiosity, would not allow such defection. There was nothing to do but go on, commit more of his forces to what had originally been a casual and innocent conversational foray.
“I don’t presume to say whether it’s true or not,” Dilman said. I know only that we are insignificant mortals, not certain of where we came from or where we are going or why we are here. Nor am I certain that all there is of ourselves or the world around us can be comprehended with our five known senses. How can we be sure we know everything?”
Kasatkin’s shrewd eyes twinkled. “We’d better be sure, my friend.” Then he added, chidingly, “Go on, go on with your tall tale. It will give me something to tell my grandchildren when they refuse to sleep. Evidence, my friend-what is the evidence that those school spinsters of yours broke the time barrier and were witnesses to events of the past?”
Rapidly, to get it over with, Dilman went on. “Both those school-teachers-one was named Anne Moberly, the other Jourdain-taught in the city of Oxford. They were intelligent, sober, conservative ladies. When they went on a vacation to France together in 1901, and decided to visit Versailles, they knew next to nothing about Versailles except for the information they had got from the Baedeker they carried with them. During their walk in the gardens, one such as we are making, they came across Frenchmen strangely attired in what appeared to be masquerade costumes. There were officials in green coats and tricornered hats. The Moberly woman thought the scenery unnatural and lifeless, one-dimensional, no breeze, no light and shade, no sense of aliveness. Then, and this is important, they crossed a small, rather rustic bridge over a ravine. And on the lawn, before the Petit Trianon over there, they saw an aristocratic lady in a large straw hat and full skirt, sketching at an easel. Not immediately, but afterward in Paris, they discussed the eerie, haunted quality of their day here, and they decided they had undergone a unique adventure, and secretly they began to research it.”
“A playlet,” said Kasatkin. “Maybe they saw actors in a playlet being put on for them?”
“No, there had been nothing like that. Anyway, they researched for nine years. You know what they found out? There was no ravine and no bridge over it in 1901, even though they had crossed it together. La Motte ’s map of the gardens, done in 1783, did not show the ravine or bridge either. But listen to this-two years after they’d had their adventure-the original map done by Mique, the Queen’s architect, from which La Motte had made an inaccurate copy, was discovered in the chimney of some French house. This original map showed the ravine and bridge that no longer existed. Furthermore, from a portrait done by Wertmuller, and from the journal of the Queen’s dressmaker telling what the Queen wore in the summer of 1789, our two schoolteachers ascertained that the aristocratic lady sketching on the lawn in 1901 was none other than Marie Antoinette herself… There you have it-well, a small part of it-what psychic experts have called the best-authenticated account of Serialism, stumbling backward through time, on record.”
Premier Kasatkin was silent as they tramped over a worn footbridge, and then he said, “Amusing… amusing, Mr. President, especially if one dreams of escaping present-day realities of possible nuclear horror by being transported into the past of 1789.” He made a short gesture toward the mist-clad grounds and trees and Petit Trianon. “The atmosphere invites escape. But it is false, a Potemkin lie to beguile and lull. All that is truth is our nuclear age, our power to destroy one another and life itself. For us, the two of us, we cannot be two old ladies running away into the past, Mr. President. The past is dead. It does not exist today. We have only ourselves and tonight and the future. Our unique adventure is to save, to guarantee, the reality of the future.”
“That is another story,” Dilman said with a smile, “still unwritten.”
“We are writing it,” Kasatkin said flatly. He sniffed the air. “The weather is changing. France can be unhealthy for common men if we are to read its dead past. Come, let us leave the Trianons and return to the present and the future.”
Kasatkin veered left, to a new path that would bring them to their motorcades waiting outside the Palace. The bodyguards, both American and Russian, were hastily doing their turnabouts, falling into position as the two leaders resumed their walk.
It was Premier Kasatkin who was speaking once more. “Mr. President, to be blunt, I like you more than the one who was President before you. The other one, he was a stranger. He came from a life that never knew oppression or want, he was like a sterile machine, and his ministers, such as your Secretary Eaton, were no better.” Kasatkin held up his hand. “Do not protest, do not defend. It is only my way of being complimentary to you. We understand each other because we have both been underdogs, like most of the people on the earth. When I use the word
“That much of what you say is true-” Dilman began.
“I have not spoken everything that is on my mind,” the Russian said. “More than any American President that has come before you, I think you understand my people and myself. You are surrounded by a reactionary clique, an elite class of capitalists, interested in promoting only their white-skinned version of freedom and prosperity. They regard us, as Communists, their enemy, as threats to the privilege and special interests they wallow in like hogs, just as they consider you, as Negroes, their enemy, and will allow you no freedom and no prosperity. Since you suffer, and therefore understand, such selfishness, I feel you and I are better able to-”
Listening, Dilman perceived Kasatkin’s unsubtle strategy. Deftly the Russian was trying to sever Dilman from his American citizenship, leave him as a second-class Negro citizen who would have more in common with the U.S.S.R. than with his own country.
“Premier Kasatkin, let me interrupt you here,” Dilman said. “I am an American who happens to be Negro. I am one person, not two who can be separated. I am more aware than you of inequality and injustice in my country. Nevertheless, progress has been made, is being made. Once our Negroes were slaves. Now they are free men. Once they were kept entirely segregated in certain areas. Now they are not. Once it would have been unthinkable for a colored man to be the Chief Executive of the United States. Now-well, here you see me.”
“Yes, you may think of yourself as an equal of the whites in your own country, but the ruling clique does not think so. I have read the reaction to your speeches and acts. Your life is in peril every second-”
“It was a Negro who tried to kill me,” said Dilman.
“Because he believed you were bending to white masters,” said Kasatkin shrewdly. “American you may be, very well,” he added. “But Negro you are, no matter what you tell me. I have observed it the entire week. What other reason could there be for your passionate interest in that little, unimportant tribal nation in Africa?”
For the first time this evening Dilman was pricked by annoyance. “Are you implying my interest in Baraza stems from my being a Negro rather than an American? If that is what you mean, you are wrong, dead wrong. Baraza chose, by plebiscite, to live under our democratic system rather than yours, and I am committed to see that their wishes are safeguarded and that nothing they have rejected is imposed upon them.”
“Come now, do not tell me they know what is best for them. What is this Baraza, really, truthfully-eighty tribes, fifty languages, primitives, leprosy-ridden and starved. You guarantee them alleged freedom, when they want food. You give them newspapers and radio stations and books and electricity, when they want wheat and livestock. No matter, no matter-as you remark, they will find their own way, decide for themselves, as we in Russia did one October week. All I have been saying is that your former President, as a white American capitalist, saw them for what they were, and saw how they could be used, as a potentially rich pawn for trading and bargaining. You see Baraza as an African American, and your interest is out of proportion to that little country’s worth. But, no matter. I understood this from the start at Chantilly, even admired it, and that was why I did not make a greater argument in our own bargaining. I appreciated the Negro feelings in you as you must appreciate the peasant feelings in me. I said to myself, Nikolai, let him have the good feeling of defending his fellow Negroes in Baraza, as long as he allows me to have the good feeling of defending the open freedom of the impoverished natives there who wish the right to support ideals of socialism. Now we understand each other fully, no?”
