In Partial Disgrace (38 page)
The Astingi believe that the Mze does not disperse when it enters the ocean, but remains a river within a river, fresh, sweet, and ochre. Taking hidden channels through the sea, it emerges as a fountain on Big Turtle Island, in the courtyard of a castle built upon a swamp at Port Chaonia, a mime of Troy, City of the Tired Ones.
And you, Stars! Pray witness Waterman’s return to his remnant element, there to welcome me in yellow depths, and buoyed by my thousand names, proceed downstream toward allies, to resume our life beneath the waves.
(Rufus)
There were several years, during the sixties, when the whole country was grinning from ear to ear, that I heard nothing from Iulus, and my letters to him went unanswered. If you could have licked my heart it would have poisoned you. The Company was not amused and threatened more than once to cut off his modest stipend. Even Ed Kirby was distinctly uncool. “He’s having us off again,” he growled. I could have put a tracer on him, but Iulus had his nasty side, and I didn’t see the point in sacrificing any of our polite Notre Dame boys.
In any event, in the early seventies, when it became clear that the country had suffered a kind of stroke, our correspondence resumed sporadically. For a time Iulus had worked as a civil engineer in Arizona, a gymnastics teacher at a girls’ school in the North Carolina mountains, and as a
répétiteur
with the Pacifica Opera, and while he never responded to any of my queries directly, one could infer from his general observations what he was up to. He apologized, incidentally, for his silence, admitting he had gone a little crazy in the sixties. There had been so many dashing young women, so many wonderful groups to infiltrate—“never have so many had so little to revolt about, but,” he chortled, “the worst dancers in history.” His autoportraits from this period are particularly compelling; though he was embarrassed only to find that even the strongest drugs had no effect upon him whatsoever, “except a slight ringing in the ears,” surprised to find how a fully formed and hardened personality might resist modern chemistry, country music, and sex in public.
And then one fine day, I arrived at work to find the hallway blocked with crates, and on my desk an index of their contents with Company instructions for summary, translation, and vetting. It was the balance of the Semper Vero Archives.
You will appreciate what I discovered that I had to deal with. There were, first of all, several thousand pages of Iulus’s family observations written in dense High Cannonian; “the Professor’s” unpublished, unreadable, endless novellas; and the secret scientific correspondence of “The Academician,” as well as OGPU surveillance records of his activities. Add to this tens of thousands of documents in every European, Slavic, and Turkic language; his mother’s letters and diaries, his father’s
Chronik
, an elaborate daybook in which his personal reflections were surrounded by daily accounts of Semper Vero, missing only a single day in fifty years; as well as the balance of his
Historae Astingae
, a subject for which no further sources existed, but everything remained to be said—not to mention more than you could ever want to know about our canine friends throughout world history. And there was more. Each box of papers was topped off with a handwritten
precis
which attempted to place his annual autobiographies in the context of the other papers. The sonuvabitch had gone literary on me! Still, I was reenergized by Iulus’s calligraphic handwriting and old-fashioned idiom immediately, and set to work with an intensity I had not experienced since the war years, like Petrarch fondling the Homer he could not quite understand. I realized that for good or ill the rest of my life had just been filled up.
In their typically understated and monotonous manner, my colleagues filled me in. It turned out that Iulus had kept a
rezident
house in Connecticut where there has always been a high incidence of abandoned homes whose attics contain some amateur unpublished work, and while this summer home had provided him with decent enough cover, his notes testified that Connecticut was his least favorite state—“an inbred and dilapidated working class servicing an incurious wealthy, whose sole motive, like the gypsy moth, seems to be to escape any troublesome sensibility. . . a political economy canopied with a warren of second-rate boys’ and girls’ schools, giving a delusive caste of renewal to the entire nonentity of a state.”
That said, it was in the imaginatively named New London-on-the-Thames, that an Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms unit broke into his unattractive green shingled splitlevel on Polaris Drive, between the malled highway and the river road, and while no incriminating substances were found, there was a complete log of every nuclear submarine which had ever sallied forth from Groton Naval Base or the Electric Boat Company, including those which had been scuttled.
Since his arrival on the
Anti-Drakon
, Iulus had always been fascinated by submarines—their fevered interior discipline, their certain silent grace and competence unknown on shore. At the back of the log, with his usual evenhandedness, there were also the routes and radio frequencies of Russian fishing trawlers, so topheavy with listening gear they often capsized in Newfoundland swells.
Iulus loathed the sea with all the irrationality of his land-locked people. “No book was ever written on a boat,” he often said. “The sea means stupidity.” And Lord knows how he suffered on his many transatlantic trips aboard that ghostly septuagenarian sub, which had to surface every three hours to expel its diesel fumes, and in which our elegant world traveler had to bunk in a rusty torpedo tube. He often mentioned to me a recurrent dream in which he was disguised as a mysterious woman in a polka-dot dress with large shoulder pads, a wide-brimmed hat, and a cheesecloth veil who flung, with a force that took the officers aback, a christening bottle of champagne against the bulbous glans of a new Trident sub, and then watched her, longer than a football field, slide rearwards into the river. Just before he awoke, the thirty-foot Douglas firs which had braced the hull’s scaffolding snapped like matchsticks.
In any event, the Semper Vero Archives which now graced the dim fluorescence of our pea-green halls were found in his backyard, sorted carefully into some one hundred and eighty-five Styrofoam picnic hampers beneath the deck of a large aboveground heated kiddie pool, where, according to neighborly reports, he often sat nude, Russian-style, keeping his log, surrounded by adoring coeds while drinking himself into insensibility. Needless to say, he had moved out a week ahead of our investigatory team. His aged batman, Catspaw, with his shock of white hair and muttonchops, looked on with mild disdain as the orange-vested agents hurtled about—emptying drawers, scattering papers, peering behind pictures and portraits—in the end offering them whiskeys and soda when they were exhausted.
The hampers of manuscript clearly worried my associates more than the log, its odd literary digressions so redolent of deep tactical and strategic deception. Why, for example, did a man who had his fine hand in every momentous event of the post-war years concentrate only on his youthful education, glossing over his considerable coups and generally taking the view that, in any event, everything was on our plate by 1938, and that we have just recycled it since? It is a daunting notion, is it not, that all the cataclysms we have experienced in our several lifetimes are historically aberrant, even insignificant? That in effect we are back to 1901, “back into the future,” as the Astingi are fond of saying, where all the threads that were dropped at the turn of the century are being taken up in our soft shaking hands again?
Now, our analysts had been largely trained in the Ivy League humanities, with more degrees than a thermometer, and their readings tended to confirm whatever method they wished to validate. They could not understand a fully contradictory work which apparently had no preconceptions, much less any self-promotion; they could not imagine what it feels like
not
to know. I suppose there will always be people who believe that art comes from ideas, culture from values, and politics from ideology. These are people who are bound to be finally ignored and disappointed, because when such notions are not confirmed by life experience, they don’t amount to a hill of beans. But nothing, not the most humiliating rejection, seems to stop them. What I found truly astounding about our analysts is that they never had a strategy in mind in case their interpretation turned out to be totally wrong. Indeed, it was only after many rereadings that I came to understand that there was no symbolic resonance to Iulus’s reticence, and that this was the key not only to understanding him, but an insight into how and why books come to be written at all—that it’s expediency and exhaustion, not ideals, which inform the edges of all art. For Cannonia, in truth, is like a seal over a seal over a seal, where the symbolic cannot penetrate and only reinforces the forgotten ancient truth that everyone is based on someone else.
My superiors kept after me, rubbing their abstractions together to see if they could make a fire, and I began to glimpse the poor distended privates of that warped modern marriage between artist and recipient. Their interrogations over casual aseptic cafeteria lunches were incessant, and somehow both infantile and patronizing. Why had I not pressed to solidify our relationship? In what percentile did his work rank in the area of its peer expertise? In private, the questioning became even more breathless. I saw that my credibility, not to mention my clearance, was on the line. To save my ass, I would have to give a little seminar.
As to not following up upon our acquaintanceship, I could have simply pled our no-fraternization policy. But in fact I learned a long time ago to avoid meeting those whom you admire. Those whom you look up to ought to be kept under constant but respectful, discreet, and distant surveillance. It’s a question of manners, really, though I hesitate to even mention that word nowadays—the truth is that personal encounters are invariably less satisfying than the paper trail which establishes them. And the only thrill of espionage, when you get right down to it, is that it sexualizes the gathering of trivia. When you embrace a document, just as when someone flirts with you, you understand from the first that while the drama is addressed to you, it is also (this is the hardest thing for a young person to understand) aimed at the
not-
you. You are merely the momentary custodian of the transaction, and one must be on guard not to over-interpret it, as well as accept the fact that its author may not be a whole person, or perhaps even a historical person with a fictitious name and feelings. And so to my superiors, I had further to say—here is something which is
not just all for you
, boys—and that acceptance is what separates the men from the boys. Wasn’t it tough old Berdyaev who said that all culture rests on the open and voluntary admission of inequality? And one can only observe that a writer who has actually known a number of interesting and remarkable people has a tremendous advantage over his peers, for Iulus, in truth, was sufficiently well-placed to observe the last generation in western society with its psyche intact. What I came to admire most about Iulus was that his was not a tale of personal suffering, though he has proven to be the ultimate survivor in every sense. He did not consider himself a victim, and unlike most immigrants, he didn’t lie. He knew that in the modern world it is necessary to turn oneself into a character in a drama if one desires to act at a high level of ethicality. He was determined to contradict experience and emerge stronger from exile.
What the Company was interested in, of course, was not an “appreciation,” much less some “interesting interpretation,” or even what they euphemistically referred to as “evaluation.” What they wanted was
knowledge
. By reconstructing the past, unraveling his operations, they thought they could extrapolate his future behavior. They didn’t really want to catch him, any more than they really wanted to read him. What they wanted, desperately, was to demonstrate that as good theoreticians, they were closing the net, reducing his options.
But proper knowledge is in no way proper judgment. The one thing the soldier-life has taught me is a profound suspicion of professionalized knowledge. You can professionalize force. You can professionalize etiquette. You can even professionalize the erotic. But you cannot professionalize intelligence. Intelligence fails when the first shot is fired. Battle plans are everything, but worthless once the battle is joined. Von Clausewitz was right to say that unless you cross the battlefield, no permanent happiness can be yours; but he neglected to add that when you are in the midst of fighting it, the battle does not exist. Espionage is a lot like literature in that it is invariably about loss, and full of folks busily writing away for people who no longer exist. History is driven by failed artists. And the main lesson of the intelligence business is this—it takes a long time to learn just how much intellect to smuggle into any transaction without ruining it, and this is as true in love and art as well. The effortlessness of the smuggling is in direct proportion to the affect of the intelligence, a fact not widely understood by our illustrious higher pedagogy. It’s not exactly that the intelligence is mostly wrong. It’s that you have the capacity to believe, when the intelligence is right. In our business, strange to say, it is the most radical skepticism which often leads to the gravest errors, our pushing of metropolitan fancies to ridiculous extremes, just like the Russians.
Further, the essential strategy of intelligence has been misunderstood by the earnest moralizers who seem to take to American soil like soybeans. Breaking the code is just the first step. Secrecy, leverage, and momentum are only marginal effects. What you really want enemy intelligence to have is sufficiently accurate information to allay their paranoia and thus hold the more maniacal of their politicians at arm’s length. It’s easy enough to create disinformation, to mislead, to ensnare, to corrupt, to assassinate. What’s difficult is to create the illusion in the worried reader’s mind that he is getting the right information in spite of us, rather than with our specific assistance. Naturally, you will need a safe house on occasion to let down your hair and hatch a plot or two, but your real safety resides in the fact that your own agencies are riddled with your opposite number, that you know what they know about what you are doing. Wasn’t it Persius who said that knowing really means nothing to you, unless somebody else knows that you know it.
