“The state, yes, the state,” said Nina. “They wouldn’t have found him if it weren’t for his brother’s betrayal. Isn’t it incredible?”
We were sitting in the living room at her house that afternoon. It was hot outside, and she’d turned on the air-conditioning. The fish were swimming in their circular bowl, and she stared at me with her calm blue eyes.
Can betrayal be praised? I would rather see you dead than know you were the one who gave away your brother, his mother had said. That was fine. Nothing justified betrayal. Was there nothing that justified betrayal? asked Nina, and then in a low voice she recited the verses by Anna Akhmatova:
They tortured: ‘‘Spill it, tell us what you know!’’
But not a single word or cry or moan
Gave her enemy anything to use.
Like his victims, Munk had managed to replace his emotions with his ideas, his compassion with his convictions. Like them, he never stole, kidnapped, or asked for money. He considered them functions of the system, individuals carrying out tasks that were destined to destroy all that was human in society. Like them, he was waiting for the incomprehensible to find its meaning in the future. Was there a meaning? Yes, because there was an order, because you had to be very ruthless to discover it in the midst of widespread confusion.
“In order to understand him, you’d have to have a conversation with him,” Nina said. Conversation, she said, as if he was a friend who could be asked to give an explanation. “Talk with that man,” she said later.
I stood up to leave. Nina was thinking of spending the summer in Europe, where one of her daughters lived.
“I’m going to miss you, dear,” she said.
We said goodbye in the garden of her house, which adjoined the garden of my own house, and so I walked through the fence and went up to my study and, from the window, once more watched her moving among the flowering plants (tulips, azaleas, bluebells) that had survived the winter thanks to her.
I had to meet Munk, but was it possible? I spent a couple of weeks turning the matter over until one day, in the middle of July, I found the argument that would justify my visit to the prison.
Chapter Ten
The heat had turned the town into a desert; the students had disappeared, the receptionists only came in the mornings, the library wasn’t open at night. Nina had already set out on her journey to colder lands. I looked after her house, watered her plants, opened the windows at night to cool down the rooms, and fed the fish that swam about stupidly in their circular tank.
Orion persisted at his circular paths (the parking lot at Blue Point, the loading bay at Davidson’s Market, the wooden bench under the trees, the old Dinky train waiting area); he went around with his radio player-recorder turned on, dressed in his white raincoat and a scarf because the heat was never enough for his icy bones. He greeted me from afar every time I crossed the campus to go to my office.
I was alone, and within that loneliness I needed to make several decisions: I had to leave Professor Hubert’s house at the end of the month, pack up my things, and make up my mind whether to go back to Buenos Aires or accept the offer to spend a semester in Berkeley. I’d spoken to them on the phone a couple of times and put together a lecture, a job talk as they call them, about the use of counterfactual conditional in short fiction, and I was preparing to travel to California with no real idea of what I would do afterward. Meanwhile I let the time pass, going out for walks, looking for cooler spots in the tree-lined parks around the neighborhood, or languishing in more neutral places; the supermarket stayed cold and empty, and you could wander down the brightly lit aisles, fill your cart, and wait in front of the cash registers until a lone employee, almost always Dominican or Pakistani, would appear, emerging from the back, from behind a curtain of transparent plastic strips. Now and then I’d rent a movie from the video section at the public library or sit down for a coffee at Small World. Once in a while Elizabeth came to visit me because I no longer went to New York; the city troubled me with its streets overcrowded by cars and stray cats.
I was feeling restless and spent most of my time out of the house. So I’d circle the streets and shut myself away in my office at the university with the windows closed. I liked to walk through the empty building with its lights that flicked on automatically as I passed down the hallways in the ample cool of the air-conditioning. I’d get there midmorning and stay until night, not doing anything, letting time pass,
