Mysteries of Motion (46 page)

Wert hadn’t been asked that question so bluntly since high school. In reality it was always being asked. In America, unless you had an ambition that showed, people didn’t know how to ticket you. Even naked ambition, properly bared, made them feel safer. You might even go farther because of it.

“On my college placement bureau’s form, I put—‘to see the world.’ They switched it. To ‘Foreign Service.’”

“Heh.” Chin on his big folded hands, Smiley was still swinging his glance keenly left-right.

“Later, for the Foreign Service application,
I
switched it, ‘To see the changing of nations,’ I put—I was twenty-three. They thought it quite elegant.” The truth often was, even when misinterpreted. “Best little statement of the departmental cop-out we ever saw,” Nosy had said. “Got you to Manila the moment we saw your resumé. We can use a young officer with your kind of talent for talk-talk.” Leaving the young Wert with the first of the romantic sorenesses which were to replace each yesterday’s heart.

“Well, you’re seeing it.” Smiley swept out a hand.

“Mmmm.” Even at breakfast the UN smelled of polyglot sweets and sours, ethnic stipulations and aversions. The smell of any of those trading places where the map changes ran off the tables like water and populations blew before the wind—how this excited him even yet! “They thought I meant—changeover,” Wert said.

“Aren’t you going to ask
me?”

“You?…Oh yes. What’s your ambition—Woodrow?”

“To have a village. An African village. Named after me.” Smiley screwed up his eyes. “One of the chiefs had already adopted me.” He said a series of African syllables, grinning. “That’s me. I could still do it. Even these days. If I went back.”

“Can’t you?”

“I’m trying. That’s why I’m here.”

“Why’d you leave Africa in the first place?”

“Came back home to marry the girl I left behind me. Biggest wedding there since old Woodrow himself. She was the daughter of a dean.” Two women from Sierra Leone passed by in their richly striped and segmented dress. Woodrow stared after them morosely. “Got hooked to stay on, at the college. And never got back to my village. Or had one named for me here.” He grinned again. “The college already being named.”

“Say”—Wert smiled at himself—already so American again. “Say, your father wasn’t by chance
the
Brown. The anthro man. My best friend from home studied with him. One great man who was really great—he said.”

Smiley’s nod plainly had been nodded many times before. “Changed my name. Added on my mother’s. Because of the overtones.”

Overtones indeed. “I even saw him once.” The old professor, pointed out to Wert by his worshipful friend had had that worldwide look to him even when shuffling unkempt down a university corridor, through colleagues tweeded up and suburbanized. They hadn’t been able to do that either to his looks or to his tongue, which now and then made the papers with near-indecent pronouncements on American life. As a father, the old anthropologist might well have been one of those who should have had only daughters—at least in America.

“So when the bid came for here, I took it,” Smiley-Brown said. “Got divorced over it. She said if I ever got back to Africa, I’d want to stay, and keep her and the kids with me, even marry them to blacks.” He snorted toughly. “You married?”

“My wife died.”

“Ah.” Smiley-Brown gazed past him and out the window. “Sunday. Know why I like to come here on Sundays? Because here there aren’t any. They’ve buried them, under their own Fridays—that’s the Muslim one, isn’t it?—and Sabbaths, and general hut ceremonies. The way they’re going to bury us. Can you imagine any of our women here? In their church hats?”

“My wife never wore a hat.”

“Ah. Both my wife and my mother did.” Woodrow drummed his fist on the table. “My—stepmother does, too.” He shuddered, opening his mouth wide.

“Ah,” Wert said.

“My father remarried, you see, quite recently. So did my wife.”

“Oh?” The traumas of the recently divorced or divorcing were always so stale and unvirginal. Must be why bachelors listened to a lot of them.

“What sort d’ya think those two would marry, Bill?”

“Mmm…m.” The old guy, Smiley’s father? Probably, by now—some woman who would clean him up. And Smiley’s wife, breathing all this propaganda under that hat? Very possibly—a black.

Smiley-Brown was staring through him, and out the other side. “They married each other.”

“Eee,” Wert said.

“Our daughters are with them. They’ve bought a brownstone here, and are sending the girls to Brearley. After all his talk.”

“And your sons?”

“Haven’t any.”

“Hah.” Having exhausted his monosyllables, Wert looked at his watch.

Woodrow placed a hand across it. “Scads of time, really. Your boulevard’s just down the road…So you see what I mean, don’t you? About the older countries.”

Wert stood up. “Sorry. No, I don’t see.” What I see is the frighteningly personal drift of all men, behind their most seigniorial jobs. I see the old ambassador at Manila, who hadn’t believed in talk-talk, but not from international conclusions—only because the sexual tremors which engaged him from wrist to liver to brain weren’t up to it anymore. Or that gambling French cultural attaché to whom all culture was a coin, including his own. Or even my own British opposite in London, who does act more impersonally than any of us, not as he thinks because his passion-for-no passion is so well ingrained—but because the passions of the belly, when sated five times a day, are more ignorable than the rest.

Three Senegalese Moslems passed in a waft of white. Wert sat down again. “It’s true, they more often travel together. Arabs. But that’s all I’ll vouch for.”

“They’re calling themselves the
new
nations, now.” Brown screwed his eyes to slits. “And why not—they’ve got real life behind their backs, re-al struc-tured
life…
while we-uns…Arrh, never mind us. Look there. And there. And there.” One brilliant group after another, leopard-sashed or pinwheel-haired or in Arab white, went under his pointing thumb. Europeans and others from the West, or dressed like the West, also thronged the hall, but Smiley-Brown wasn’t seeing them. Harder to, of course, but whether this was because they were more faded in color or more complex in spirit, only time could say. Certainly another quasi-European Westerner couldn’t.

The room was full of people tangentially closer to Wert and each other than most, each conscious that this ribbon of humanity they were in was an era. The scene had that tremendous, noisy vigor which the centrally busy passing scene always did. He’d never met such publicly displayed human surety as was flaunted here—in a hall no longer in its heart devoted to the curatorship of the living world but crowding in for the ceremonious process of its dying. For the coming pyrotechnical death-talk, each country wanted the best seats in the house. There were no shy people here.

The hugely turbaned pair of Sierra Leone women passed their table again, ripely as chords in music. Behind them, traipsing on and off one game leg, went an old Hollander, Wetter Malm Schroon-Malmsey, whose names had eighty years ago been amassed to hide the Javanese grandmother he was now forever mentioning. On the committees which dealt with those political prisoners whose betterment had been his lifework, he had the most pacific of tongues, careful never to speak aloud the controversial word “freedom.” While he talked, one could see again the stolid Dutch galleons which had steadily plied history while others fought. When worsted in an argument, he dipped his old bones and blanched-vegetable face like a third-rate actor, one hand on his heart, the other flung high in minuet. He believed in his own cause, yet like most here his very strengths came from a cynical flow exactly opposite. The most enduring international politicians had the same temperament as women of fashion; they were not profound thinkers but experts at seizing the infallible costumes of the moment, blithely aware that they already had fifty other exploded eras in their closets. Sincerity was not involved. Or the earthly paradise either—unless it happened to be à la mode.

“I rather wish I could be like the people here,” Wert said. “They know for sure the passing scene is—just that.”

“Ah, man—you want a village.”

“Balls.” Both their ambitions, so picayune. “But if I come across a tribe, a noble savage tribe where it’s in the structure for the fathers to marry the sons’ wives—I’m sure there must be one—I’ll let you know.”

“Thanks, there’s a kind bastard.” Smiley was bright red. “But now that you’re offering—take me along with you, this afternoon.”

Wert recoiled. “Why?”

“Maybe because I know the way. Queens Boulevard may be near, but it’s not easy.”

“I’ll find it.”

“Maybe because I haven’t seen a wedding lately. Not one catered by Western Electric International.”

“Sorry.”

“Maybe because I’d like to meet those three ladies.” With each try, Smiley-Brown leaned farther across the table, almost kneeling on his chair.

“It’s a Moslem household. Can’t take a man they don’t know.”

“You
haven’t met them.”

Wert threw up his hands.

Smiley-Brown sat back with the calm which came from being beyond embarrassment. “Maybe because I want to hear that old guy give the responses, then.”

Wert swallowed; red crept up him also. Anybody who bothered to look could see the two of them for what they were, two angry dogs from the West. “He won’t be giving them.” A wave swept over him. Two homesick dogs from the West. He could almost see Bakhtiary standing at his elbow in the stage fog which traditionally surrounded such visitants when they came to warn—or to give advice.

“Don’t the men speak at their weddings?”

“In the only one I saw, bride and groom had separate rituals. But for all I know, this one could be taking place at the Teheran Hilton. With our ambassador acting as best man.” He looked over his shoulder. “No, I don’t really believe that…How would they do it in your village?”

“They—” Smiley-Brown shrugged emptily at his own fingers, elbows on the table among the dishes. “Nemmind.” Chin in hand, his look swept round again. “Suppose you think I’m a monomaniac,” he said hopefully.

“No.” I think you’re a fairly normal man, of the sort often born to excessive fathers.

“What, then?”

“I think—maybe you had to persuade yourself—that you were one. Or were persuaded.” By the daughter of a dean. “And now it’s gone. Your village is.” Others having taken advantage of it.

Smiley-Brown had his head between his hands now. The waiter, hovering for so long, had left, perhaps thinking bitterly that people who could afford to conduct all their emotions in restaurants, did so at his expense. Or else that all the emotions of such people were table-size. Wert laid down a large tip.

Smiley-Brown sat up at once. “Sorry. I only see the kids every other weekend. This is the other week. They always ask me about the village. And never listen to the answer. If it has gone
kaput
for me, you’re the only one noticed it.” He laid a tip beside Wert’s, patting the package which sat between them. “Help you out to the car with that thing? No? Don’t blame you. I might jump in…Well. Think I’ll take this desperate character to a movie.”

“Wait.” Hoisting the package, Wert put it down again, back into the social framework where so much he had accumulated was going to waste. “Your girl goes to Brearley, you said? The—troubled one?” Though he hadn’t quite said.

“See you know the lingo. Don’t tell me you do have—”

“No.”

“Didn’t think.”

Wert picked up a napkin and brushed at a spot on the package. “Why not?”

“Something two-dimensional about men your age who don’t have offspring—troubled or not. Hadn’t you noticed?” Smiley-Brown, having broken down in front of him was getting back at him for it. Whereas in Meshed, or Tabriz, they’d have linked pinkies over his outburst, and wept mutually.

“Hmmm.” Wert looked down at himself. “Well, I’ve still got a vest.” He pulled a pen from it. “Listen. Do me a favor. Call up a friend of mine whose girls go there, too. Spend the afternoon.” Was this dirty of him, or Samaritan? Dirty at first, but then the other. “You won’t be sorry. Warm house.” Soft beds. “Just don’t say I sent you, mind. At least not at first. Today you’re just a wounded parent wanting to talk to another one.” Over here his suits never had any accumulation of paper. He tore off a flap from the package, wrote a name, number and address on the reverse side, and handed it over. “Her troubled daughter’s name is Nancy, same as hers.”

Smiley took the paper and read. Half smiling, he tapped his teeth with it.

“Don’t get the lady wrong. She’s a friend.”

“But I’m not supposed to mention it, hah?”

“Not right away.”

“Not until your own afternoon errands are complete, eh. I see.”

“No you don’t. Never mind. If you do choose to go, you’ll find it—” How could he say it? It’s where the two of you can weep mutually. “You won’t have to—walk a chalk line there.”

He let Smiley help him to the car after all.

“Oh I’ll
go,”
Smiley said, lingering at the car door, tensing his long unmufflered neck in the raw air. The sky had a leaden secrecy; it was about to snow. He shivered like a bird. “I’m curious.”

No, you
are
desperate, Wert said to himself, stowing the package in the passenger’s seat. Arms still around it, he stopped short. But how do
I
know?

Smiley was studying the reverse side of the paper with the telephone number on it. “Fortnum’s. That the place where the grocery clerks—
clarks
—dress like—deputy ambassadors?” He let his eyes flick over Wert’s second suit, the ten-year-old one, which he was wearing in deference to the coming afternoon, and back to the piece of brown paper the wind was fluttering.
“Biscuits,
it says here. That great heavy thing holds biscuits? Poor Soraya. And what was it—Fatima? You must be making a play for big Madame.”

“They sent
me
a pot from Iran that’s damn near a national treasure,” Wert said sharply. “The old man did. I’m returning it.”