These Dreams of You (12 page)

T
he small crowd chitchats, some with Zan, who barely can think after the lecture. At the pub he craves a shot of tequila but settles for vodka, not wanting to embarrass anyone with presumptuously exotic requests. “Right, then,” says J. Willkie Brown, setting the vodka on the table between them in one of the pub's back rooms. Zan isn't inclined to ask Brown his opinion of the lecture; he would be genuinely uncon­cerned if he weren't being paid £3,500. Brown says, “What's next?”

Z
an says, “Well, we wait for Viv to come back from Addis Ababa.” To his surprise, he has to suppress an impulse to tell Brown about the foreclosure.

“Yes, of course,” says Brown, “any news on that front?”

Zan chews his lower lip. “No.”

“Hmm,” Brown just nods. Off in the area of the bar, Zan can see Molly getting Parker a Coke and Sheba a Sprite; the boy is trying not to get talked to by some of the students while Sheba reverts to form, climbing on things. “A bit of a handful, aren't they?” He tries his best to sound good-humored about it.

“This is nothing,” Zan says. “Peace in our time, to quote a British prime minister. It's like the nanny has cast a spell on Sheba.”

“I see. So what's it all about?”

“The nanny?”

“Viv in Africa.”

Zan looks at Sheba, out of earshot. “Her mother,” he answers, nodding at the girl. “I mean her birth-mother.”

“I thought she was an orphan.”

“Well, James, orphans have mothers. They're just not mothers who are in the picture anymore.”

Brown says, “But this one is in the picture now, I take it?”
“It's not that she's in the picture,” says Zan, “it's the way she's
not
in the picture.”

Brown shakes his head and shrugs.

“We've been trying to find out about the mother for a while.” Zan glances back at the girl. “Someday she'll want to know. She'll be angry if we never tried to find out. She'll be angry at us anyway about one thing or another, about all kinds of things, but this one she'll have a right to be angry about. A couple of months ago Viv got a journalist in Addis on the trail, he asked some questions, and now there are these . . . well, they're not even
reports
, they're too undefined to be reports, they're rumors . . . or what have you . . . that this journalist Viv hired was getting close to some discovery about the mother and, in asking all kinds of questions, something happened to her. She's in jail. She's in hiding. She's fled the country. She's dead.” He looks at Molly. “Listen, what do you know about—?”

“Another drink?” asks Brown.

Zan realizes he's downed the one hand he has. “O.K.,” he says, pulling some money from his pocket, “let me—”

“Don't be bloody silly.” The Englishman gets up to get another drink. Zan continues watching Molly and Sheba, calls over the waitress and orders fish and chips for the kids. When Brown returns, Zan says, “The kids like your fish and chips.”

“Hmm,” says Brown.

“Thanks for the drink,” says Zan.

F
ortified, not that Brown necessarily needs it but he supposes Zan does, the Englishman says, “The flaw with your lecture, of course . . . ” He pauses to see how this beginning registers; Zan raises an eyebrow and Brown continues, “ . . . the flaw is that it presumes there's a history at all, doesn't it? I mean the whole original business, Jesus and God and all that. Hardly the stuff of history, is it?”

“How do we know?” says Zan.

“But you don't mean you believe in God?” says Brown.

Zan makes a show of pondering this as though he never has before. “Fifty-one days out of a hundred.”

“What kind of faith is that?”

“The best I can manage. Whether anyone calls it
faith
or not, I don't much care.”

“But why bother to believe at all?”

“Because it's not a matter of whether I can be bothered, it's a matter of what I do. Believe, I mean.”

“Are you certain?” Brown says. “I mean, people who believe do so because they rather want or need to, don't they?”

“Well, a lot do. Maybe most. But no more so than those who don't believe.”

“How's that?”

“Not believing because you need not to, no less so than the person who does.”

B
rown shakes his head. “Not following.”
“Sure you are.” Everyone picks arguments with me these days! thinks Zan.

“I don't believe because there's no intelligent reason to.”

“Horseshit.”

“You've become rather more forceful than when I used to know you, Alexander. Rather more talkative.”

“So everyone tells me lately. Maybe I always think I'm on the radio.”

“Or the vodka perhaps.”

“Probably.”

“But that doesn't mean that what you say makes more sense, does it?”

“Listen, if you're being purely rational about it, then agnosticism is the only stance that has any logic to it. The atheist is just another kind of zealot. You're zealous in your non-belief but the zealotry is no different from the zealotry of faith.”

“But how can you believe in God?”

“Fifty-one days out of a hundred . . . ”

“Explain to me
one
day out of a hundred.”

“Who cares?”

“Meaning you can't answer, can you?”

“Meaning do you care.”

“I'm positively riveted.”

“Because it makes more sense to me,” says Zan.

“God makes more sense?”

Z
an explains, or tries to, and Brown does him the courtesy of appearing to be absorbed if in no way persuaded. “Right, then,” he says, with a small gesture of his hand, “so why not a hundred days out of a hundred?”

“I'm scandinavian,” Zan explains. “We don't do joy.”

O
n his third vodka Zan muses out loud, “Ronnie Jack Flowers.”
Brown makes that little gesture with his hand again. “Don't know him.”

“
I
knew him,” Zan says, “twenty, twenty-five years—”

“Are you all right?” Brown interjects.

“Why? Don't I seem all right?”

“Oh, certainly.”

“Do I seem drunk?”

“Not necessarily. But then I'm not sure I would know, would I? With you, I mean.”

“Twenty, twenty-five years ago . . . ”

“Ronnie Joe . . . ”

“Ronnie Jack. Black, hard-left politically. Radical politics in the Sixties, militant . . . ”

“Panthers, then.”

“I don't know. Maybe. But armed resistance, anyway, up against the wall, all that. I think I
am
a bit drunk.” Zan holds his head a moment. Because he's prone to migraines, it's normal that with the first sip of liquor his head begins throbbing. “But when I knew him, like everyone in the Eighties, he had left the Sixties behind.”

I
t was a common story in the Eighties, of course—former Sixties radicals in the mainstream, doing well. Ronnie Jack loved the best clothes, the best cars, the best stereo equipment, good food, beautiful women—the Stalinist from
Esquire
, still talking left “and I mean left,” says Zan, “I don't mean New Left, I mean Marxist-Leninist left,” which seemed quaint even with the Cold War still going on. Ronnie Jack took the good-will trips to the Soviet Union and considered the people there to “have it pretty good,” in his words; and if, as Zan did once or twice, the contradiction was noted between Ronnie's politics and the high life he lived, Ronnie would answer, I just think
everyone
should have the best clothes and best cars and best stereo equipment and beautiful women.

Zan and Ronnie Jack worked in the same building, where the former wrote for a travel magazine and the latter was in the public relations department of an insurance firm. They met through Jenna, a Stalinist that Zan was dating and with whom Ronnie Jack—more the ladies' man than Zan ever was—had gotten nowhere. “Wait,” Brown says now, “you were dating a Stalinist?”

W
hat can Zan say? She was a hot Stalinist. Brown hair, brown eyes, the smile and body of an italian starlet. “But didn't the fact,” says Brown, “that she was a Stalinist . . . ?”

“Oh, of course,” scoffs Zan. “But you know, I convinced myself it was somehow no different than one of us being a Republican and the other a Democrat, and particularly since I was neither, I thought we just wouldn't talk politics. What I didn't know is that if you're a Stalinist, there's
nothing
that isn't political.” Jenna literally was a card-carrying member of the Party even if Zan never saw the card; and he was so fraught to sleep with her that he went to a couple of meetings, where everyone was ancient, the median age well over seventy—so it became obvious what the Party saw in Jenna, which was the same thing Zan saw: a sexy young woman in her mid-twenties, putting a beautiful and glamorous face on the movement.

A
fter that, it became difficult for Zan to take seriously certain national paranoias. The idea that these codgers were going to take over the country, that the country had to be on its guard against them every moment, was laughable, not only because they were feeble in body but because among them there wasn't a single independent thought. If, for instance, in the course of one of Jenna's monologues about fascism it was pointed out that Stalin and Hitler had a pact, Jenna denied it ever happened, insisting it was a creation of an elitist media—something Zan hears back home now, where no compass is consulted in common, where the designation of north is considered by some a state plot, where facts and information are the coordinates of suspect maps, where people who actually
know
things are the enemies of “common sense.” Soon sex with Jenna wasn't worth it anymore, not least because sexual licentiousness was yet another myth about a doctrinaire Left that in fact regarded eroticism as decadence, a mass social opiate like religion. She was the single most repressed woman he ever knew.

W
hat survived Zan's affair with Jenna, at least for a while, was a friendship with her comrade if not lover Ronnie Jack. Perhaps the fact that neither man was sleeping with Jenna provided a bond. Then Zan got fired from the travel magazine for “insubordination” and being a “disruptive influence,” the last time until lately that he was considered by anyone as volatile, and which he took as a sign to finish what still could be called his most recent novel—“most recent!” Zan laughs to Brown. “That makes it sound, well, fucking
recent
, doesn't it?” In the novel was a very small character, a few paragraphs in a single chapter, based on Ronnie. Zan changed a detail or two but not, as it turned out, enough, because when the book was published, someone in the insurance company where Ronnie worked read it and concluded that the black man working in his department was the Stalinist with a militant past in the Sixties—and Ronnie lost his job.

Z
an pleads to Brown, “What are the odds? This was twenty years after all the Panther stuff, if that's what it was, and this novel was read by, you know, a hundred and thirteen people on the planet, eighty-seven of them in Japan or some place–and one just happens to work in the same insurance company as Ronnie Jack Flowers? It was enough to make me believe in all their conspiracies after all. And what I didn't understand in my white naïveté is that west of Connecticut there literally was a single black executive in the insurance business. If I just had left out the word ‘insurance,' nothing would have happened. One detail too many. Mostly, though, I thought, Who cares? And of course that was the most naïve thing of all. Who cares anymore what anyone did in the Sixties? Isn't half the workforce former radicals now paying into pension funds?”

B
rown says, “Another vodka, then?”
“No,” says Zan.
“This story is somehow directed at me, I take it?”

“I'm not sure anymore,” Zan says sincerely, “but then I'm not finished. Let me finish and we'll decide.”

“Lovely,” Brown shifts in his chair.

“There's two points, really, one I was trying to make to Viv, whose culpability in the matter of whatever happened to the woman who may or may not be Zema's mother—”

“Whose?”

“—Sheba's mother is far less than mine in the whole Ronnie Jack Flowers affair, and that point is, Viv is responsible for doing what she can to make things right, but she can't hold herself responsible for how things turn out, because we live in a world where sometimes the right thing is just not going to turn out. The other point has to do with Ronnie himself, who I saw being interviewed on a ‘news' cable channel, if you can call this particular channel such a thing, while we were waiting in the airport to come to London and for Viv to go on to Ethiopia.”

B
rown says, “He's become a prominent figure, then.”
“Now,” Zan explains, “he's vice-chairman or co-director for something called Civic Organizers Network, and his politics are as far to the right as they once were to the left. And here's the thing—Ronnie hasn't changed at all, as far as I can tell. Because the specific content of his views is beside the point. The point is the totalitarian pathology, the pathology of zealotry or, if you want to put it in more secular terms, ideology. Because what the zealot or ideologue really believes in is the zealous nature itself, the devout embrace of hard distinctions—the crusade against gray. It's a story as old as the original novel, historical or not—the Damascan convert. The completely adamant non-believer who becomes the believer, and the thing that hasn't altered an iota is his adamancy.”

“Not to mention that perhaps this chap's politics were always as opportunistic as you suspected.”

“That's not for me to say, and it takes me off the hook for nothing.”

“I think perhaps this story,” says Brown, “is less about my zealotry, as you've characterized it—that part, I assume,
is
directed at me—and more about why you haven't written a novel since.”

“Touché,” says Zan, lifting to him the empty vodka glass. “I would drink to you if my glass weren't empty.”

“I offered you another, didn't I?” Brown points out. “And I assume this new novel you're writing now,” he continues, gesturing in the direction of Zan's daughter digging into her fish and chips, “is about a white man raising a black daughter at the same time a black bloke is president of his country?”

Zan is shocked. “Of course not.”

“Why not?”

“Because there are things about race that no white person can understand. Because no white author has the moral authority, not to mention insight or wisdom, to write such a book. Don't be daft, as you Brits would say.”