Wednesday started like Tuesday, with a smiling Marie Rijn.
“Today I intend to wash and press the curtains, Doktor. They’re dusty, and the windowsills are a disgrace. You may be neat, but …”
The implication was that I wasn’t clean enough, and that the white lace curtains—did any truly Dutch residence have anything besides shimmering white lace curtains?—weren’t either.
“I do appreciate it, Marie.”
“I know, Doktor. Long hours you work and there being no family to be as clean as it should be …”
I nodded and searched out my overcoat, leaving the house to her.
The day was gray and windy. I didn’t see mister Derkin at Samaha’s, not that I probably ever would, and I did get to my office early.
After reading and discarding David’s rewriting of the minutes of the last faculty meeting, I picked up the wireset and tried to reach Llysette. She answered neither her home number nor her office extension. Perhaps she was in class, although she usually managed to avoid teaching before nine-thirty.
I rummaged through my case and laid out a draft of the test for Environmental Economics. Was the question on infrastructures too broad? Would they really understand—There was a rap on the door.
“Johan?” Young Grimaldi stood in the door of my office. In his European-cut suits he was always chipper, and I suppose I would be too with that much money, even if his family had been forced to flee from Ferdinand. “Do you have a moment?”
“Almost an hour, if you need it.” I grinned. “What’s on your mind?”
He slipped into the hard chair across the desk from me with that aristocratic elegance. “They reopened Monte Carlo—the casino.”
“Ferdinand did? When?”
“Sometime last week. There’s always some delay in the news coming out of the Empire.”
“At times I have thought it would be nice if our reporters had some delays imposed. Then a lot of trash wouldn’t make it to print.”
He looked appalled. So I added, “I don’t mean Ferdinand’s kind of censorship—just delays. Does it really matter whether an aging movie star like Ann Frances Davis could never forget her one great love, an obscure football announcer named Dutch? Or whether Emelia vanDusen is going to wed Hans van Rijssen Broekhuysen and unite the two largest fortunes in New Amsterdam?” I took a deep breath. “The reopening bothers you?”
“It shouldn’t. I’ve lived almost half my life in Columbia.” He glanced toward the window and the gray clouds before continuing. “Sometimes, Johan …” He offered a self-deprecating grin. “It would be easier to forget the past.”
I understood, although I didn’t know that he knew that. “Sometimes … but without the past we wouldn’t be who we are.”
“I suppose. And I suppose that things could be worse.”
“There is always the issue of progress,” I offered.
He frowned. “Do you really think the world is a better place now? That progress in technology has meant anything more than better ways to kill?”
“Medicine is better. Women don’t die in childbirth, and that makes for happier homes with fewer tormented ghosts.”
“It also makes for bigger battles with fewer ghosts to remind us of the horrors of war.”
“That’s true enough. On the other hand, we don’t see civil wars in the Balkans. There aren’t any pogroms in the Polish and German parts of the Empire. The Greeks stopped killing the Turks generations ago—”
“That’s probably because Ferdinand’s father killed most of the Greeks, like his grandfather killed off most of the Serbs.” Grimaldi snorted. “And that left the Croats with all the land.”
I shrugged. “Some rivalries only end when one group is exterminated.”
“You approve of genocide?”
“I didn’t say that.” I forced a laugh. “I have noticed, however, that peace among human beings tends to exist only as a condition of some sort of force, and some groups seem destined to fight forever—like the Irish and the Brits, or the Copts and the Muslims.”
“Or Japan and Chung Kuo? That could get nasty—maybe nastier than Ferdinand’s March to the Sea—although I don’t see how.”
“Don’t say that. From what Llysette has told me, it was pretty horrible.” I paused. “Still, things can be horrible anywhere. DeGaulle’s efforts to push New France’s boundaries right up to the Panama Canal haven’t been exactly bloodless, and the Panamanian Protectorate is effectively a Spazi police state.”
At the mention of the Spazi, Grimaldi glanced toward the open door.
“I’ve said far worse.” Still, I changed the subject. “You said that the story about the casino upset you.”
“I don’t know,” Grimaldi mused. “The story about the casino—I can recall running for the dirigible, and hearing the roar of the panzerwagens. My father never opposed Ferdinand. He even offered to accept an Austro-Hungarian protectorate. Ferdinand didn’t even bother to respond. The armored divisions just poured out of San Remo. What could President Bourbon-Philippe do? The Spanish had already caved in, and Columbia …” Grimaldi shook his head.
“I’m sorry.”
He laughed harshly. “There’s not much you can do, Johan. Not more than fifteen years later. At least they had to wait almost twenty years for my father’s ghost to fade.”
There wasn’t too much I could say about that. So I nodded.
“Everything’s so quiet—here or in what remains of France. So clean, so efficient. Even Ferdinand’s gas ovens are environmentally safe—except to the Gypsies and the outspoken Jews. Everyone just goes to sleep and doesn’t wake up. It’s a hell of a quietly efficient and environmentally sound world, Johan.” He looked at me. “Why did you leave the government?”
“It got harder and harder to do my job. Let’s leave it at that.”
“I think I understand.” He shook his head and stood up. “Time to face the well-groomed and empty-minded masses.”
“All young in any culture tend to be empty-minded,” I pointed out. “I suspect” we were.
“We were probably happier then.” He gestured from the door and was gone.
I looked at the test for a while, made some corrections, and packed up my leather folder for my first class.
As I walked across the green, absently waving to Hector, bagging leaves in a dun-gray canvas bag, I wondered how many people like Grimaldi and Llysette were tucked away in the back corners of Columbia, unable to protest for fear of losing their last sanctuary. Even I had looked to the door at the mention of the Spazi.
The wind, almost warm, blew through my hair, but I shivered anyway.