(1964) The Man (70 page)

“Sweetheart, from now on you’re not Edna Foster and I’m not George Murdock. We are Mr. and Mrs. Murdock, almost, for all intents, and whatever we say to one another, and that goes for both of us, is sacred as pillow talk. Agreed? Agreed.”

“I love you, George. You’ll be famous, I know.”

“That’s not important. I love you too, that’s all that matters. You have a great trip to Paris, and stay away from those seductive Frenchmen—”

“George, silly—”

“—and when you return, I’ll be right here, with the wedding band and a job, a real big job this time. That I can promise you for sure.”

COMPLETE TEXT OF PRESIDENT DILMAN’S SPEECH AT APPROXIMATELY
11:00
P.M. TONIGHT CLOSING THE FIVE-DAY CHANTILLY CONFERENCE FOLLOWS. THE PRESIDENT IS DELIVERING THE ADDRESS AT THE CONCLUSION OF THE STATE BANQUET BEING HELD FOR HIM AND FOR PREMIER NIKOLAI KASATKIN OF THE U.S.S.R. BY THE PRESIDENT OF FRANCE IN THE HALL OF MIRRORS OF VERSAILLES
PALACE. SIMULTANEOUSLY THE TEXT OF PREMIER KASATKIN’S REPLY WILL BE RELEASED AT THE SOVIET EMBASSY.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER THE BANQUET, PRESIDENT DILMAN WILL RETURN TO PARIS FROM VERSAILLES. HE WILL SPEND THE NIGHT IN HIS SUITE AT THE QUAID’ ORSAY BEFORE FLYING TO WASHINGTON IN THE MORNING
.

W
HILE THE
five-day conference had been successful, the long hours had been strenuous, and Douglass Dilman had intended to return to Paris the moment that he and Premier Kasatkin and the French President had finished their public speeches. But when the formalities in the Hall of Mirrors had ended, and the bewigged, liveried servant had assisted Dilman from his chair, the Russian Premier energetically charged to his side.

“Mr. President,” Kasatkin had said in his guttural yet clearly understandable English, “you do not leave so soon to go to bed, no? In my country, to lie down after much rich food and wine is like lying down in the grave. Always, after feasts, I walk for thirty minutes in the court inside the Kremlin walls. We must enjoy a breath of air together in the magnificent gardens of Versailles, not to observe how tyrants built and lived, but to see that we live in health, now that we are friends and in accord.”

For a moment Dilman’s mind went to the five days of arguments, concessions, bartering in the drafty Grand Château at Chantilly. Although the Soviet Premier had been generally reasonable, his occasional flare-ups of temper had been irritating, as in the instance of his demands for freedom for native Communists in Baraza and other AUP countries. Too, his sporadic sarcasm had been annoying, as when he had chided Dilman and Eaton for finding a Communist bogeyman under every American bed. “You outlaw the Turnerites on the pretext they are using our good Moscow gold to overthrow you,” he had said. “Do you think we are crazy to waste money on your oppressed minorities, to incite them, when they have more anger against their capitalist overlords than we ever had or will have? Bah. When you are in trouble, you try to wriggle out and divert your masses from your own shortcomings by making them see Red, at home or in Africa.” Yet the gibes, the tantrums, had been fewer than Dilman had expected, and after Kasatkin had spoken his pieces for his Presidium and
Pravda
back home, he had always proved ready to trade. He was not a fanatical crusader, Dilman had guessed early. He was a pragmatist. When he spoke as Communism’s voice, with Lenin’s intelligence, he was perverse. When he spoke for himself, with his own intelligence, he was reasonable.

Now the Russian had extended a friendly and spontaneous invitation to Dilman, and Dilman found the other’s brusque, forthright, roughneck warmth difficult to resist or offend. Yet Dilman was tired. “Well,” Dilman said hesitantly, “I had promised Mr. Illingsworth and Secretary Eaton we’d try to get back at—”

“You promise nothing to the ones who work for you, you owe them nothing,” Kasatkin said with mock severity. “You owe only your proletariat, the working people, your allegiance and health to do good.”

Dilman cast a sickly smile at the Russian leader. “I’m less certain than you that my proletariat—or yours, for that matter—are all so unanimous in worrying about our good health.”

“You speak for yours, I shall speak for mine,” said Premier Kasatkin cheerfully. “Come now, Mr. President, some air, the two of us together, no advisers, no specialists, no petty bureaucrats. Five days we have been surrounded. One night, the last, let us be alone together, a social promenade to cement our continuing good relations. What are thirty minutes in a lifetime, after all? And who knows?” He winked broadly. “Our thirty minutes may mean more to the world than our other accomplishments of a lifetime.”

The Russian seemed so determined to end their meeting on a friendly note that Dilman could deny him no further. “Very well,” he said. “A short walk, then, in the gardens.”

Arthur Eaton had come upon them during the last exchange, and he appeared pained, trying to indicate that he disapproved, but Dilman avoided his eye. Dilman had permitted the Russian to take him by the arm, when Eaton finally protested. “Mr. President, we’re expected to depart—”

Premier Kasatkin brushed his hand toward Eaton as he might brush off a bothersome fly. “You go have some champagne with the other courtiers, Eaton. You keep busy with my pretty secretary with the yellow hair over there—Natasha. She admires you. Give your President and me, two simple men of the streets with bad table manners, a chance to discuss earthier matters alone—like our children, and our hernias. A half hour, Mr. Secretary.”

And now Dilman and Kasatkin were crossing the ancient cobblestone courtyard of the seventeenth-century Palace past the saluting Garde Républicaine, marching through the gate of the iron grillwork fence, preceded and followed at short distances by United States Secret Service men and Soviet KGB agents.

As the two leaders entered the 250-acre gardens, Dilman could see that the autumn season had already stripped the ancient trees of their green foliage. Yet the night was mild, refreshing, and the varicolored gush and spray of the spotlighted fountains lent their walk a festive air.

Dilman indicated a path that led in the direction of the Trianons, and the Russian Premier nodded and turned off with him, while the bodyguards ahead scampered back into line. Out of the corner of his eye Dilman glanced once again, as he had so many times in the past five days, at his Soviet counterpart and marveled at the familiarity of his face. What there was about Kasatkin, he had realized from the moment of their first handshake in the Grand Château at Chantilly, what there was that had partially disarmed and captivated Dilman, was the Russian leader’s uncanny resemblance to old Grandpa Schneider.

In the pantheon of Dilman’s memory, the brightest eternal flame honored Grandpa Schneider. When Dilman was seven and eight and maybe nine years old, surrounded by squalor, poverty, anger, deprived of all love except that which his mother could find strength and time to spare, the only male affection and guidance that Dilman had known had come from Grandpa Schneider. The old man—although lately Dilman had realized the old man could not have been
that
old then—had not been a grandpa and his name had not been Schneider. He had been an immigrant Jewish bachelor and a tailor (which, in Yiddish, was
schneider
), and because, when he was not hunched over the sewing machine or over the steam presser, he sat in a rocker, wearing a shawl and spectacles low on the bridge of his nose as he stitched, he had become Grandpa Schneider to the colored neighborhood and had been as pleased as if he had been crowned.

For Dilman, as a child, that rickety hot tailorshop had been the manor hall of a bountiful prince. Sitting cross-legged at Grandpa Schneider’s feet, while the old man repaired his shirts or patched his knickers or black stockings for free, Dilman would listen big-eyed to anecdotes of a faraway duchy named Bialystok in a kingdom named Poland. From Grandpa Schneider he would receive at no cost, and in equal quantities, Jewish aphorisms, licorice sticks, revised stories from Sholem Aleichem and Tolstoi, cinnamon rolls, and capsule biographies of such intellectuals as Emma Goldman, Lincoln Steffens, Elbert Hubbard, and Arthur Brisbane.

Long years later Dilman had often thought that more than the material deprivation of his youth, the oppression of his race, the goading of his mother, it was the magical goodness and encouragement of that kindly, improbable old tailor that had sent him to books, to schools, to law, to whatever he had become in life. During the hard years much had gone out of Dilman’s memory, or faded into the hinterland of memory, but not Grandpa Schneider. Dilman’s love for the old man was ever there, burning bright.

And that was why, although he had come to the Chantilly Conference tense, prepared to be aggressive, he had been immediately softened by Nikolai Kasatkin, despite the latter’s subsequent bombast. For the faces of the Soviet Premier and the immigrant tailor of cherished memory were almost the same face. Thereafter, Dilman had been unable to be anything but friendly, amiable, and receptive toward Kasatkin, who, himself disarmed, most often responded in kind. If the Chantilly Conference between two of the mammoth powers on earth were a success, and its success one day recorded by learned professors in weighty historical tomes, would there be any mention in any index of “Schneider, Grandpa”? Well, so much for definitive histories, Dilman had thought.

Tonight, observing Premier Kasatkin strutting beside him along the Versailles garden path, Dilman still saw the old tailor’s knobby peasant profile matching the Russian leader’s profile, but he observed more. For all his sixty years, Kasatkin was taller, heavier, more muscular than the one residing in Dilman’s memory. Too, Kasatkin’s silver hair was fuller, his nose more pugged, his bridgework (startling, when he laughed) made of stainless steel and not gold.

Kasatkin had moved his head, caught Dilman’s glance, and smiled. “Yes, you are familiar with this dynastic relic, I see. It is my first visit. Has it changed much since you were here after the Second War?”

Dilman blinked. “How did you know I’d been here before?”

“I have no time for strangers,” Kasatkin said. “I must know of a man before I consent to meet with him.”

“Yes, I came to Versailles, this place, twice, with an attorney friend from Chicago. It was during the liberation period. We were flown over. We were officers, Judge Advocate’s Division of the Army.” He searched off. “As far as I can make out, it hasn’t changed much, though I’m not sure I recognize everything. I knew the way to the Petit Trianon—you know, Louis XV built that little palace for Madame Du Barry, then his son gave it to Marie Antoinette—because my friend, a very learned man, told me a modern-day ghost story about it, which I never forgot. It was one of those things that sticks in your mind.”

Dilman turned toward Kasatkin, as they continued walking. “Have you ever heard about the two lady tourists, English schoolteachers, who came here to do some sightseeing one afternoon in 1901, and about the people they ran into and the objects they saw that did not exist then or now, but did exist over a century before? I mean, those two schoolteachers, walking through the Versailles gardens in 1901, just as we are walking tonight, they somehow 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.”