PART ONE

Chapter One

Blue Sea Lake, Summer 1953

Emmett Jones watched his wife, Suzanne, in evening sun so strong he couldn’t make out the gold stitching on her yellow dress, though it was a detail he’d memorized. He was wishing the sun would set. He was thirty-three years old, impatient for the pleasures of the night, optimistic at dawn. Right now he felt intensely lonely.

They were entertaining the undersecretary of state at External Affairs, Bill Masters, and his wife, Ethel, on the lawn that ran down from Suzanne’s cabin to the white stone at the shore of Blue Sea Lake.

Suzanne had been listening to Bill Masters talk when she’d suddenly stood up and, with visible effort to calm herself, suggested, “Let me sweeten your drink, Bill.” Emmett looked at Suzanne’s lightly tanned cleavage, then down to her hips, to her knees, pressed together, suggestive yet gracious, wifely. She leaned over her Cape Cod chair and stretched her hand out toward Bill.

Bill Masters held his glass out to her, its ice half melted around a slice of lemon, without interrupting his steady stream of talk. “The prime minister agrees with me,” Bill said with leering, wheezy confidence. “I told him, ‘Mr. St. Laurent, we’re going to put Emmett Jones through the most intensive, the most exhaustive, the most thorough investigation that any man can be put through, short of skinning him alive.’”

Suzanne, her voice hardening like burnt sugar, asked Bill, “The same?”

“You’re gonna look clean as a razor when we get through with you.” He gave Suzanne a glance — “Yeah, please, that’s fine” — and returned his attention to Emmett. “We’re gonna tell Security, ‘Go to it, boys, and take your time. Run him through his paces. You’ll see. Mr. Jones is an open book.’”

The Joneses’ baby daughter, Lenore, planted on a white blanket on the grass, watched Bill’s mouth. She was drooling, a pearly flow bubbling over and soaking her undershirt.

Sleep pooled in Emmett’s brain, towing him under. He stood up and held on to his chair till the dizziness passed. Suzanne came behind him, brushing her hand across his back. “I’ll put dinner on,” she said, her fury apparent to him alone — though perhaps also to the ears of the undersecretary’s wife, Ethel; maybe Ethel’s ears were tuned to female frequencies, where Bill’s were not.

Ethel sat on a lawn chair with her ankles crossed, wearing a rayon paisley dress and stockings, despite the heat, and sporting beige, rubber-soled shoes with open toes, ready for the treacherous, grassy terrain by the lake. She was overheated. Thirty years in Ottawa and Ethel still dreaded being left alone with the men. She’d had a vegetable garden back in Moose Jaw when she and Bill were first married; she grew onions and garlic, radishes and rutabagas. Ethel watched helplessly as Suzanne gathered little Lenore onto her hip and stalked across the lawn toward the cottage.

Emmett Jones knew how mad his wife was because she’d forgotten to refresh Bill’s drink. He went to the butler’s wagon and checked the ice.

Bill kept talking. “We’re going to give those bastards down in Washington more dope than they’ll know what to do with.”

Emmett felt a surge of fury at the mention of Washington, at the gall of the Americans pushing External Affairs into investigating him, investigating one of their own. He turned his back to Bill and held aloft a bottle of gin. “Tonic or vermouth?”

“Let ’em into every corner of your life, Jones,” Bill went on, oblivious. “Vermouth. Tell ’em everything, every bolt and screw.” He leaned forward, with his elbows on his knees. “You still got your tonsils?”

“Yeah. In fact I do.”

Bill clapped his hands once, like a football coach. “Attaboy.”

“What would you like, Ethel?” Emmett asked, turning to her. Ethel told him, with surprising energy, that she wanted a glass of water. In his exhaustion, he wished to protect Ethel, put her in a crate and mail her back to the nineteenth century where she belonged. When he delivered her a glass of water drained from the ice bucket, she gave him a desperate smile, embarrassment and sympathy in her brown, spaniel eyes. He made two martinis, added the twist, gave one to Bill, and quickly drank the other without speaking.

“It’s what we’ve gotta do,” Bill persisted.

Emmett took in the grounds surrounding the cottage —Suzanne’s cottage really, through her mother — the docks and boats and white pine that seemed to inhale the long sunlight. The place spoke of money with casual discretion, superbly beautiful. Bill had stopped talking and was holding his martini to his shapeless lips, refusing to take a sip until Emmett had capitulated, had agreed — he only had to tell External “everything” and he’d be in the clear; External would leave him alone and let him get on with his life; the Americans would back off.

The rustle of aspen. Purple, silkily rolling waves from the white tail of a boat’s wake struck the shore. The long U-shaped dock composed of symmetrical planes of greying wood was a shrine to good taste, a discreet Canadian shrine. No obvious shrine paraphernalia, other than the butler’s wagon filled with gin that he’d rolled out onto the lawn at Suzanne’s request. No white paper pennants on sacred rope between the Jack pines, as there would be on Mount Fuji, paper pennants linking Japanese sugi trees. Sugi wouldn’t survive in this country, and he missed them, the supple Asian trees, and then he thought of his father, and his father’s Japanese mistress, and the mountain behind the house in Shioya near Kobe, where he grew up, where his father’s mistress had lived. He thought of the quietude of that house in Shioya, the Japanese insistence on stillness, on purity of form and intention — a pose. But here in Ontario, he thought, people pretend not so much to purity as to goodness, a family compact, an assumption of class, a birthright, a powerful, profitable delusion.

Bill Masters was waiting. “Can’t say you’ve got any choice in the matter. Get the investigation over with, and you’ll feel a whole lot better.” Then he knocked back the martini.

Suzanne called from the cottage: dinner was ready or would they like another drink? Bill held up his empty martini glass for a refill. But Ethel rose and swooped, deftly scooped Bill’s glass and turned so swiftly, she bumped her broad satiny hip across Bill’s Presbyterian nose. Bill followed her with his eyes as she piloted the uneven lawn to the stone stairs and wooden screen doors of the cottage. So there did appear to be one person on earth to whom Bill Masters was obedient. He gave Emmett a mother-is-calling grimace and heaved himself to his feet.

Suzanne had set the table in the veranda with the white china, with a white vase filled with lilacs. Lenore was installed in her high chair beside Suzanne’s place at the head of the table, opposite her husband. Solemn Lenore appraised Bill Masters, her lips firmly closed around her favourite spoon, her hands freed to fool with the bits of chicken and carrot and cooled cubes of potato in her Winnie-the-Pooh bowl.

The chairs were too low for the table, putting them all at some disadvantage. Suzanne served the chicken and asparagus and passed them each their plate, close beneath their chins. Ethel received her asparagus reproachfully, forced to commit a mortal sin, permitting herself a small protest: “At sixty cents a pound?”

Thrift was not innate to Suzanne. Speaking openly about the price of anything struck her as vulgar. She may at times have been comparatively broke, but she’d certainly never been poor.

Ethel seemed to grow more plump nestled in her chair. “My daddy used to grow asparagus,” she said. “We’d be sent out to find it. There were eight of us children, you know. I was the eldest of eight.” She began to speak to Lenore in her high chair. “It grew like grass, and it didn’t mind the drought if it had a bit of sun and a bit of shade. That was the Great Depression. I think we might have starved without our garden.”

Lenore, dangling her silver spoon from her mouth, turned her grey eyes on Ethel.

The change of venue, the unfortunate chairs, his wife’s disclosures, all of this seemed to have put Bill Masters off the scent. He shook his jowls, declining the wine: “No, thanks, don’t care for the stuff.” Emmett watched him deposit a thick slice of chicken breast behind his molars and chew; he observed the chicken go round inside Bill’s cheek and unwillingly imagined Bill making love to Ethel. Bill caught his eye and said, “Whaza matter?” Then perhaps for the first time Bill noticed that there was a baby present, Lenore, giving Bill the full benefit of her gaze. “You’re gonna choke on that spoon,” said Bill.

Suzanne took the spoon out of Lenore’s mouth and put it in her bowl. Lenore’s chin and fists were glistening with drool, her cheeks were chapped and brightly red, but she never took her eyes off Bill.

Suzanne said, “I think it’s terrible, what happened to the Rosenbergs.” Emmett was silent. She was familiar with that particular, disapproving silence. He didn’t like the topic. “But it is,” she insisted. “They were murdered! That was state murder!” She looked quickly at Lenore to see if she understood — Lennie still refused to talk, but that didn’t mean she didn’t understand — and lowered her voice. “Executed. That poor woman.” She appealed to Emmett. “The two of them, ending like that.”

“But they were communist spies, my dear.” Ethel was tucking into her dinner when she said this and seemed to have surprised herself by speaking. “I read it in Time,” she explained apologetically to Bill.

“Hunh,” said Bill.

Emmett’s hands rested palms-down on the table. He was staring at his plate loaded with food. The Rosenbergs had been killed in the electric chair one week ago today, at eight o’clock in the evening, as a matter of fact. He shook his head; he had water in his ear from swimming, it was hard to think straight. The FBI had used Ethel Rosenberg — he saw Ethel Masters stoically fold asparagus into her mouth; the sun was low behind Suzanne’s back, burning the image of Suzanne and Lenore onto his retina and illuminating Ethel Masters’s facial hair — they’d used Rosenberg’s wife to try to crack him, psychologically break him, make him talk.

Emmett wanted to be alone with Suzanne. To hold her, to tell her, It’s come to this, my love, my life, a very bright light, a manmade uranium sun, has led us here. So don’t let them break you, but be bold, be righteous and forgetful.

He said to Bill, “I want to thank you for all you’ve done for my career.”

Bill was eating. “Just cooperate and it’ll all blow over in no time.”

“No, seriously. I might not have a chance to thank you later.”

“What are you talking about, Emmett?” Suzanne asked.

“I mean, I might not have a chance to say very much, while I’m under investigation.” Both ears were plugged so his voice sounded in his own head. He realized that he yearned for their sympathy. He did feel self-pity, and he was angry, very angry. He said, “Do you believe the Rosenbergs gave the A-bomb to the Russians, Bill? Simple as that?”

“Sure. That’s why they went to the electric chair.”

“And all those people killed in Korea, we should blame the Rosenbergs for that. Right? Julius and Ethel.” Confidingly to Bill’s wife, “Her name was Ethel too.”

Bill thought about it and agreed, “Yeah. And communists like them. You can’t tell me the Russians would’ve figured out how to make an atom bomb without help from fools like Rosenberg.”

“Why not?” Emmett was behaving recklessly; Suzanne wanted a drink. He went on, carelessly, stupidly, “We did.”

“We most certainly did not,” said Ethel. Emmett Jones appeared to be drunk. These people, they act like bohemians. And with all that money behind them. Goes to show you. Anglicans.

He tried to pour Ethel some wine, but she put her hand over her glass so he poured some for himself, drank it, and said, “I could’ve sworn we dropped a couple of A-bombs on somebody.”

Ethel, coldly, crisply: “That was not our decision.”

“Well,” Bill said, wiping his mouth, “it was a lousy end to a lousy war.” He pushed his chair away from the table. “Very nice,” he told Suzanne.

Suzanne, stunned by her husband’s wayward speech, roused herself. “Oh! What am I thinking?” She pried Lenore out of her high chair. “You need a bath!”

Ethel said she’d gather the dishes, and Suzanne thanked her and fled, jostling her solemn child under her arm. When Ethel took Emmett’s untouched plate, she gave a little sniff and said, “Think of all those starving children in China.”

With Ethel clattering in the kitchen, and Suzanne off bathing the baby, the men were left to their own devices. It was solstice, so the sun didn’t seem to set but to swerve to the south, leaving the stage for the entry of an orange moon. Bill and Ethel were to stay the night and drive back to Ottawa after brunch tomorrow, a Sunday. Emmett observed vaguely, “I believe Suzanne made a pie.” They sat on, stymied, until Bill finally said, “Ah, come on, Jones,” and stood, put his hands in his trouser pockets, and strolled away from the table. “Pour me a real drink, will ya?”

The place was built entirely of red pine in 1878. Emmett felt compelled to tell Bill this, his voice trembling, while he poured them both brandy. The veranda wound nearly full circle, with a tall, sloping ceiling. It was furnished with comfortably sagging furniture. And of course, there was art: framed posters of Maxfield Parrish and several of Suzanne’s photographs — conventional, for the most part, aside from one nude: a man’s thin back, his ribs, his bones like silver forks.

“Nice place,” agreed Bill, looking like he wanted to go home.

Emmett didn’t light a lamp and was warily gratified that Bill didn’t insist, make some wisecrack, Pretty romantic, Jones. Ya want me to go blind? Bill drank his brandy and appeared to be appreciating the moon on the water.

Emmett was standing behind Bill in the near dark when he asked quietly, as if bemused, “Why doesn’t Ottawa protect me?”

Bill jumped and turned, almost angry. “That’s exactly what we’re doing! Jesus!”

“In a secret investigation by the RCMP.”

“It’s gotta be private. You want everybody to know?” Bill turned his back again; he gazed at the rippling moon on the lake with something like resentment and added, “Actually, it’s in the hands of External’s Security Panel. Harold Gembey’s in charge. Harold’s working close with the RCMP.”

“Harold Gembey. Great. Just great. Thank you very fucking much.” The servile bastards at External. He was acquainted with Harold Gembey in Security. Gembey was a long-time civil servant, started there in the middle of the war, and he’d turn on any man if he could make himself look cleaner than clean. He’d be obsequious with the Mounties, obsequious with the FBI.

In the dark, Bill turned again to look at him. “You’ve got nothing to hide, do you, Emmett?”

“Everybody’s got something to hide.”

“Oh, sure.” Bill seemed to be trying to come up with something, some secret of his own he’d need to conceal; he shifted from one foot to the other, thinking. Finally, he leaned forward, breathing into Emmett’s face, and in a low voice he said, “Look, pal. You’re young. Idealistic. These guys, these RCMP fellows, you’re gonna find they’re decent, real Boy Scouts. The man who runs the operation is no sucker. He’s navy, a vet, a young fella, like you. He’s not stupid, he knows something’s up with the Russians, ever since Gouzenko.” Igor Gouzenko was the cipher clerk at the Soviet Embassy in Ottawa who’d defected right after the war, exposing a Canadian spy ring in the process. “We’ve gotta protect ourselves from the communists. Come on, Emmett. Frank Miller down in Washington, he thinks you’re a commie. So? Just answer the questions and straighten him out.”

Then Bill added almost in a whisper, “Thing is, somebody’s put a finger on the minister.”

He meant Lester Pearson, minister of external affairs. A woman, Elizabeth Bentley, had named Pearson in her testimony to the House Un-American Activities Committee. That was nearly two years ago, it was old news, Bill was trying to pretend that he had some inside info. Emmett said, “The woman who gave that testimony about Pearson is pathetic. She’s insane.”

“Tell me about it,” said Bill.

By moonlight, Emmett could see the blue, broken blood vessels travelling over Bill’s swollen nose, the heavy lids and puffy bags under the eyes, and he marvelled that this was the face of a man with nothing to hide, nothing but self-interest masked by piety; a team player.

Bill held out his brandy snifter, requesting a refill. When Emmett returned with their drinks, Bill took a big, functional gulp of brandy, heaved himself into a wicker chair, and said, “Now. Tell me about this prick Norfield. That his name? John Norfield. What’s he got on you?”

 

Chapter Two

Toronto, Fall 1946

John Norfield had three scars in the shape of sunflower seeds pressed into the skin of his cheekbone from a childhood bout of chicken pox. It only made him more handsome, even beautiful. The women would watch the smile come and go in his narrow jaw. It wasn’t good humour they saw there, not in the sense that he was sharing the joke. He was a different kind of man, but then, people were different when they came home from the war. John Norfield was so terribly thin, the women said, gaunt; and his clothes hung on him, just so. That night a rumour went around his smoky party that he’d been a POW in a Jap camp.

Emmett Jones, another war vet, a student at the ripe old age of twenty-six, didn’t know John Norfield, his host, having been brought by some classmates from university. He wanted to introduce himself and found Norfield in the living room talking to a girl. “Well, we had to,” the girl was saying. Her back was turned to Emmett, the green stuff her dress was made of rustled, revealed her white shoulders. She wore her blond hair in a roll, and he stared at the long, shapely neck. “With the war, we had to grow up fast,” she told John Norfield. She was dressed for a fancier party, so she looked out of place here, square, in her ballroom gown where most of the women wore narrow skirts and thin blouses, smoking cigarettes. Emmett looked over the white shoulders to see how this fellow Norfield would treat somebody like her. With smooth tolerance. A girl like that can say any kind of nonsense to a man.

When John Norfield looked past her, directly at Emmett, his eyes changed aperture; everything changed, his interest, his expectations. Something like a lynx, a seething, cool interest.

The girl wasn’t so fatuous as not to be aware that she’d lost Norfield’s interest, and she twisted to look up at Emmett Jones’s spectacles.

Norfield leaned past the girl and stuck out his hand, “Hi. Welcome.”

Emmett said hello, then hello to the girl.

“Oh,” said Norfield, “sorry.” He put his face close to hers. “Susan, right?”

“Suzanne.” She accepted this small slight with a neutral modesty that Emmett liked and then put her hand firmly in his. Emmett guessed from the handshake, the husky voice, the costly dress, that she had family; he was already wary of her father.

John Norfield put an unlit cigarette between his lips and took her elbow. He had to speak close to her ear, over the party noise. “Let’s sit down, out of the crowd.” He indicated that Emmett was to follow.

Suzanne in her green dress with an eggy white lining squeezed in at the end of a long horsehair couch while somebody gave over the armchair to Norfield and Emmett took the low ottoman, folding his long legs, his knees up around his ears. Suzanne settled, then gave a little cry and squirmed a magazine out from under her. “Oh! The New Yorker !”

The party was loud, a lot of rye, a lot of rum, gin, beer, and marijuana, though few of the guests knew what it was, that sweet smoke. It was too loud to talk. Norfield indicated to Emmett, Have a look.

But Suzanne had taken possession of the magazine. She showed a proprietary thrill in finding The New Yorker here, away from home, and shouted over the noise, “I adore their cartoons!” It might have been the cigarette smoke, it might have been that she didn’t have the confidence she pretended to, but she paled as she began to read, with a quick draining away of pride. She leafed through, stopping to read a bit, slowly turning a page.

Emmett saw her and he felt disturbed, persuaded by her.

There was a girl called Carmen at John Norfield’s party, in his surprisingly nice one-bedroom apartment on College Street. Or at any rate, she looked like a Carmen, alert breasts in a tight red sweater, launching herself onto Norfield’s lap, probably the girl who’d stay after everybody had left. She wrapped her arms around Norfield’s neck and kicked her feet, smiling at Emmett, saying, “Hi ya.” Then, “Oh! She’s got Hiroshima!”

Suzanne’s face when she raised her head from the magazine was stricken, as if she’d been caught looking at dirty pictures. There was something young about her that would probably never go away.

For a few minutes, the party chatter pounced on this particular New Yorker. They argued over how it was to be pronounced. Hero-sheema. Hear-ah-shima. A young man wearing the jacket of his army uniform with a red bow tie removed the magazine from Suzanne’s hand, as if doing her a favour. With drunken solemnity he pronounced, “I hope they drop a handful of A-bombs on Moscow.”

Suzanne didn’t even raise her head to look at him but reached to retrieve the magazine and continued to read. Her eighteen-karat hair swept up in a French roll, her ankles crossed beneath her party dress, she could have been reading A Christmas Carol. Emmett Jones and John Norfield studied her. Emmett asked, “What is it?”

“John Hersey’s thing on the A-bombs they dropped on Japan,” the drunken vet answered with clipped, elaborate sobriety. “They gave the whole issue to him. No cartoons.” Then, directed at Suzanne, “Hey, little girl, it’ll give you scary nightmares.”

Carmen took a cigarette out of a silver box sitting on the side-table and put it between her lips for John Norfield to light. “The whole thing just makes me want to give up on the human race,” she said, the cigarette bobbing between her lips.

Norfield put her off his lap. He looked unwell. Carmen pressed her palm against his cheek and said, “Hey.” Norfield waited for her to take her hand away.

Suzanne’s lovely forehead under all that hair. Carmen caught Norfield looking at this pretty young woman in the green gown and told her, “It’s not news, honey.”

“Oh,” said Suzanne. “I knew about it. That we dropped the Bombs. And ended the war.”

“We didn’t. They did,” said the bow tie. “Americans. They’ll do anything, crazy bastards.”

Suzanne handed the magazine to Norfield. The skin of a woman’s hands slipped off in “huge, glove-like pieces.” At the park near the river in Hiroshima, the “slimy living bodies” were searching for their dead families. In Hiroshima, the people in their homes, on the street, at school, they were burnt alive, little babies and children, their mothers and fathers, in a few bright seconds they were charred sticks, she knew that before, didn’t she. Or, surviving in fire and ash, getting sick, their skin falling off. “Thanks. My dad’ll have a copy, I’ll read his.”

She looked like she needed air. Norfield reached for her hand and said, “Come here.” He took Emmett’s arm and pushed him ahead, ushered them out, and closed the door behind him, then the three of them stood in the silent hallway.

 

They walked down to a diner near Spadina.

“You’re just going to leave your own party?” said Suzanne, nervously flattered.

The two men waited till she took a seat at the long counter and then they sat on either side of her, their legs touching her dress.

“It was winding down anyway.” Norfield slapped the magazine onto the counter and shoved it toward Emmett. “Happy reading.”

Emmett drew it toward himself but didn’t open it. He stared at the pleasant scene on its cover, a watercolour of a summery America taking its leisure. “I grew up there,” he said. “Not Hiroshima. East. In Kobe. Or near there, in a place called Shioya. In a kind of estate for foreigners.”

The girl, Suzanne, said, “How exotic!” She looked lost for a second and then asked, “Do you still have family there?”

“My parents are both dead.” He saw her shocked face and added, “It’s all right.”

“Ah,” Norfield was saying, “that explains it.” He wasn’t paying much attention but was looking to the end of the counter where a man in a homburg hat had just sat down. Norfield’s complexion was yellow, his hands shook when he lit his cigarette. Emmett thought that maybe it was true about Norfield being a POW. You don’t look well after that.

They sat with “Hiroshima: A Noiseless Flash” wrapped up in its busy cover illustration. With some effort, John Norfield was dragging himself into a sociable range for the benefit of his two new friends, who, he was aware, would find it strange to have their host take them from his own party.

Norfield had a nasty, chemical taste in his mouth. One of the challenges in returning from Hong Kong was to remember that he had to appear to be kind. He’d been back in Toronto for ten months, out of a Japanese prison camp for more than a year. Not yet enough time to be reconciled to the easily won indulgences, the boredom of his fellow citizens in the Kingdom of the Golden Mean. In the camp, a Chinese couple, man and wife, starving, slipped food to him through the barbed wire. They did this two or three times. The last time, Norfield had already received their small package, concealed it under his shirt, and was walking away when they got caught, the man and his wife. It was the smell that gave them away; they’d wanted the food to be warm. They were beheaded in the prison yard while Norfield was forced to watch. That’s solidarity for you. Home now, six months ago, walking down College Street, he’d lost control of his bowels. It took a second; in a surge of terror the veneer he’d carefully applied was stripped away; he remembered how things really are, and he shit himself. Now he presented to Jones and this girl, Suzanne, his cool attentiveness. He knew that he was clean; he made sure of it.

“So you grew up in Japan,” he said to Emmett, who just a moment before had asked him about his bookstore — Emmett had heard that Norfield ran a bookstore and dredged up a question: “So how do you like that kind of work?”

Emmett swerved to try to intercept Norfield’s sudden interest. “I lived in Kobe till I was sixteen.”

“What year was that?”

“Nineteen thirty-six.”

“Why’d you leave?”

“I had TB.”

“I had a cousin who had that,” Suzanne said and froze: the cousin had died.

Norfield spoke dreamily so it was hard to reconcile what he said with how he said it. “Think the Japs might’ve murdered and raped more Chinese if they’d been better organized?”

“No, I don’t. In fact, the opposite.”

“Just got caught up in the frenzy, eh.”

“That’s right.”

“You speak Japanese?”

Emmett said that he did.

“Think you’ll ever go back there?” Norfield asked idly.

Suzanne, her breathy voice, compassionate, “Without any family?”

“Kobe got bombed pretty good, I hear,” Norfield said. “Nearly wiped out.”

Emmett tightened. “That’s right.”

In the greasy mirror behind the grill, Suzanne watched herself with the two men. It was her first year away from home, living in residence, Falconer House, which was nice. She’d never be able to go home again; even if she went back, she wouldn’t really be living there, not anymore. She saw that Norfield was looking at her. She was used to that, but this time it mattered.

Norfield was looking at Suzanne, but he was talking to Emmett. “So? Ever going back?”

“I hope to, one day. I want to find someone there. She’s sort of family. She’d be an old woman by now — if she survived.”

“Much chance of that?” Norfield asked. “Survival?”

“I hope so,” Emmett said again.

“Full of hope, are you? Well. The Americans are their pals now. Never saw a country take defeat so easy. Duck to water.”

Norfield droned on about the American military occupation of Japan, his voice flat, without inflection. Emmett was beginning to wonder if he could like him, and he scolded himself: cut the guy some slack. Then Norfield said, “Hey. What about China?”

“What about it?”

“You think the communists are going to take over?” Norfield raised his voice to ask this. At the end of the counter, the homburg hat lifted, and Emmett saw the face of a man his own age; he was surprised — he’d thought that a man dressed like that would be older. Norfield and the man in the homburg looked at each other in the mirror. Norfield gave a sudden grin with a fresh cigarette in his mouth.

Suzanne said, “I should be going.” She climbed down from the stool. “Oh” — she opened her handbag — “my treat,” and laid down fifty cents.

“How are you getting home?” Emmett wanted to know.

Norfield said, “We’re going to take you.”

Suzanne was stuck. The girls she’d come with were probably still at the party. Getting back to residence alone, the dark streets, thugs, muggers, vets. “Don’t you have to go back to your guests?”

Norfield shrugged. “C’mon.”

 

Chapter Three

They escorted Suzanne McCallum to her residence, Falconer House, trotting her briskly between them. She felt their eagerness to be rid of her, and she was bewildered because she knew they were attracted — but that didn’t matter; they wanted her out so they could talk about who-knows-what. The first attraction is always between the men.

Suzanne knew men by instinct. She didn’t know how she’d come by this wisdom, being an only child. And what good would it do anyway? Condemn her to boredom unless she could turn to steel like her mother; it would make her a great dance partner, though she didn’t know if such things would even continue to exist, after Hiroshima and all, after the death camps and the “noiseless flash.” Emmett Jones and John Norfield didn’t talk much on the way. She would’ve liked some real conversation. There was so much to talk about. But she was shut out.

They practically tossed her at the front door, gave her thin segments of their faces, Emmett with his glasses like two O’s when the porch light caught them. And John, the way his teeth fit in his jaw, so thin, and then his mouth. He stood out of the light. Yet she felt his resentment.

They each saw the hem of the green dress, and they turned away.

“What time is it?” Norfield asked.

Emmett had inherited his father’s watch. It was after midnight.

Norfield asked, “Want to see my bookstore?”

“Now?”

“C’mon. Want a cigarette?”

“I don’t smoke.” Emmett figured that Norfield must have forgotten the TB. But after they’d walked in silence for ten minutes, Norfield said, “You don’t look like a consumptive.”

“I’m not. Not anymore.”

“That why you didn’t go over?”

“I went over. Air force.”

“See some action?”

Emmett answered tersely, “Yes.” He pretended to be interested in the buildings they were passing. There was an element of yearning in Norfield’s question.

Norfield dragged hard on his cigarette, then flicked it into the gutter. “My store’s here.”

They’d arrived at a narrow storefront with a green shutter and door. Once inside, Norfield turned on a small lamp. The book dust made Emmett sneeze. He was tired and wished he hadn’t come.

Norfield disappeared through a curtain behind the cash register and was gone for several minutes. Emmett called out, “Is there another light out here?” Norfield’s white face reappearing. Emmett sneezed several times, saying, “Can’t see the books.”

Norfield handed him a cup of coffee and turned on the overhead bulb. Full disclosure, shadowed eyes. “That what you want?” He turned it off. “Better?” He took the shade off the lamp and the room brightened. “You tired?”

“I think I’m going to head on home.”

Norfield held out his hand. On his palm lay two pills. He took one and popped it into his mouth, offering the other to Emmett. “This’ll take care of you.”

Emmett tried to swallow the pill dry, as Norfield had, and then burned his tongue with coffee.

Ten minutes later it hit him like joy. His hands could read. He could inhale the meaning of the books he slipped from the shelves. One word. One sentence. So he knew Bernard Shaw, Mayakovsky, Maxim Gorky, Jack London, John Reed, D.H. Lawrence. “What’s D.H. Lawrence doing here?”

“Think he’s bad?” asked Norfield. He came and stood close.

“I don’t know. Sort of — homo.”

Norfield laughed. He seemed — if not happy — exalted. He took the novel from Jones’s hands, set it down, and said, “I liked the ecstasy. I liked the beauty, when I was a boy, before the war. When I was a boy, I only believed in beauty. I was truly sublime, man.”

Emmett felt Norfield’s voice like a hand on his spine. It was nearly too much. He didn’t want to leave, not anymore. They were standing close, beside the counter, and Norfield leaned back on his elbows. Emmett couldn’t take his eyes off John’s collarbone where he’d opened his shirt and loosened his tie. From every angle, John was perfectly made, and he smelled good, a fresh oniony heat. He didn’t look sick anymore. Maybe the pill had taken care of it.

John said, “Before experience, everything’s just speculation. Before experience, we’re sleepwalkers. Deluded.”

And in this way, Emmett and Norfield began a long night of talk, pacing, riffling the books. Norfield encrypted his stories, cut them up. He said he’d had three weeks of fighting in Hong Kong. Then he was a prisoner of the Japanese for the rest of the war. Four years in Japanese prison camps. “You speak Chinese too?” Norfield asked.

“Well, actually — ” Emmett was tempted to tell him, yes, a little, and he hoped to learn more. He’d discovered that it was unusual, his fluency in Japanese, a rare talent in a young Canadian man, and he planned to build on that, maybe become fluent in Mandarin, to find a career in his seemingly exotic talents.

But now Norfield was going too fast to listen. He needed to tell. He was with his brother when Hong Kong fell. His brother was hurt. It was bad, but they were together. Then the Japs shipped his brother away, to Niigata, on the Sea of Japan. “I tell you this,” he said, pointing his cigarette at Emmett, “because maybe you holidayed there.”

Emmett looked at him blankly.

“Did you?” Norfield persisted.

“As a matter of fact — ” Emmett began. He had holidayed there.

“Forget it.”

Norfield’s brother died at Niigata. Emmett said, “I’m sorry.” Norfield waved his hand to say, Change the subject. But he himself came back to it. “It hit me,” he said. “All those deaths.” He shrugged. “That one really hit me.” He asked Emmett, “You have a brother?”

Emmett didn’t have a brother. Norfield put his arm around him. “I came back through Guam, and heard he’d died back in ’43. It hit me.”

“I know,” said Emmett.

“Deplorable.”

The word seemed funny and they laughed, their eyes on each other.

Norfield said, “The look on my mother’s face when I got off the train without him.”

At Canton, his first prison, Norfield had been forced to kneel on the floor of the cell and look at the wall. “The wall, all day, every day, staring at that wall. Not even allowed to scratch the fleas. A bad six months.” He inhaled almost a quarter-inch of his cigarette. Norfield’s jaw was clean and fine, his scent seemed to come from his throat.

“Your eyes are nerve endings,” Norfield said. “You become what you see. You get infected.”

Emmett understood. He began to feel that he wore Norfield’s face, a replacement of his features that would persist long after the effects of the pill had faded.

Book dust, but otherwise Norfield’s place looked impeccable, newspapers neatly stacked, five pens, a silver soup spoon that seemed out of place, four broken pencils, ten pennies in a row.

Except the spoon affected John Norfield’s nerves and so did the lint in his pocket; so did the little girl with a skipping rope he’d passed by that afternoon. The spoon may be put into a drawer, but he’d know it was there; it could be placed in alignment with the broken pencils but it would remain, the spoon, a stray article. For Norfield, since the war anyway, all objects and every incident in time were one-offs, un-belonging, irreconcilable.

“So — air force,” said Norfield. He’d been fiddling with the miscellaneous stuff near his cash register, and now he stopped and deliberately put his hands in his pocket.

“That’s right.”

“What. Don’t tell me. You were a pilot.”

“Yes.”

“Where?”

“Europe.” Emmett didn’t want to talk about it. He wasn’t going to be one of those vets who couldn’t get over it. He dreamed of doing some kind of international work. Everything he’d experienced, everything that Norfield had been through, it had to mean something, there had to be progress, redemption. He had hope. He didn’t want to talk about Germany.

Norfield waited a moment, and Emmett thought, If he forces the issue, I’ll leave, but Norfield turned away and said, “Listen to this.”

He played a record that first drove Emmett out of his mind. Saxophone. Unnatural music. “It’s Bird,” Norfield said.

“No bird ever sang like that,” Emmett said, wanting him to take the music off.

“Listen. It’s Charlie Parker,” said Norfield. “The greatest musician of the twentieth century.”

“Listen,” Norfield said again — was it five minutes later? “That’s my soul. What I am.” Disorder precedes; instinct, nerves precede. Ideals — honour and glory and sacrifice — have been reversed in precedence: the incidents, one-offs, the terror of pocket lint, of pencils, the little girl hopping incessantly, discontinuous happenstance, a tarnished spoon, this indefinite chaos is called peace. He kept a tidy place, Norfield did, but the ten pennies must be lined up with the pencils, and it was terrifying.

Norfield lifted the needle from the record. An ashtray piled high with butts. “What’s the hour?” asked Norfield, looking ill. “Never mind. Forget it.”

Norfield put his arm around Emmett’s shoulder. Emmett took a drink of Norfield’s smell inside his clavicle. He liked it very much. He moved closer, caught himself, quickly moved away. “So tell me,” Emmett wanted to know, but what? Just tell me something. What do you believe in? “What do you believe in?” he asked.

Norfield said, “I believe in a Chinese man and his wife who shared their food with me when I was in prison.” Then he said, “Tell me about Germany.”

Emmett said, “A city called Hamburg.”

Norfield was listening to him now, like the needle.

Emmett, seeing the view from the air, confessed, “And a place called Darmstadt. And Weser. Magdeburg. Heilbronn. Some smaller sites, hydroelectric dams, missile laboratories, that kind of thing. And some medieval towns in the Baltic. Lübeck, Rostock. Old wood, you know. It burns well.” Hamburg had been the greatest success, with thirty thousand dead. Darmstadt, six thousand dead. Weser, nine thousand dead. Magdeburg, twelve thousand dead. And so on, more and more dead.

The fires rose fifteen hundred feet in the air. When they let go the four-thousand-pound “cookies,” his plane sank and then soared, black earth below turning crimson, then the next wave of planes dropping “breadbaskets” filled with incendiaries, instantly, a sea of fire, that’s what everyone said, It’s a sea of fire. Fire sucking the air out from under him, then his plane accelerating up and out of there before it inhaled him, dragged him into the dragon’s mouth, flying up, dodging flak.

“Hero,” said Norfield.

“Yeah. Well. Nobody wants to talk about it.” Bomber Command was not a popular memory. Emmett didn’t come home with a medal for heroism. Not a single man, dead or alive — and there were more than fifty-five thousand dead airmen from Bomber Command — received a medal during or after the war. And no one talked about the deaths of six hundred thousand German civilians by Allied bombing. Winston Churchill failed to mention Bomber Command in his victory speech on VE Day. Emmett was one of the untouchables. “I did what I had to do,” he said.

“You miss it?”

Emmett didn’t know him well enough. He said, “I’d rather think about the future.”

“That’s what we need more of.”

“A future.”

Norfield said, “Hitler and Hirohito are dead, but the fascists still run the show.”

Emmett didn’t know what to say to that.

Norfield went on, reluctant, as if he didn’t normally bother to explain what he meant. “Look,” he said, “look at how far the generals were willing to go. Thirty thousand dead in Hamburg? Okay. Now let’s go for a hundred-thirty, hundred-fifty thousand killed in Hiroshima. How many in Nagasaki? Eighty thousand people killed, another two hundred thousand dead from fallout, who really knows? A couple hundred thousand people exterminated with one bomb. You think the men who run this show are ever going to give up that kind of power over us?”

Emmett had never talked to anyone about this before; since coming home he’d never confessed to his actions in Germany. His pals in the air force had mostly scattered. A few of them still hung around together, but he wanted nothing to do with them. He wasn’t going to be one of those vets who couldn’t get over it. He heard an awful moan, and in a panic he looked at the record player, thinking the terrible sound came from there, and then he realized it was coming from his own gut. Norfield caught him as he was falling to his knees, and held him, the two men kneeling. Emmett was weeping. He hadn’t seen it coming.

Norfield held him, saying nothing, just held him steadily. Emmett felt like it was almost all right. He pulled away, stood up, wiping his face. “I can’t let that happen.”

“Confuses people,” Norfield observed.

They were okay; they smiled.

Emmett still felt the effect of the pill, a weird ecstasy. His face was taut and salty. He didn’t know why he trusted Norfield with so much, but he did, he trusted him completely.

“If we don’t fight fascism,” Norfield was saying, “they’ll come for you anytime they please.” He began to fiddle with the pennies again, arranging them. “We don’t defeat the boot, we don’t defeat capitalist power, if we fail to do that, we will have nowhere to go, nohow to live except in slavery, there will be no inside where we can live free from the capitalists’ control. The police, police everywhere, they work for the rich with their international money invested in whatever it takes to keep us powerless to fight back. They’ll watch you in everything you do, you’ll be exposed at all times, my friend, there will be no privacy, they will have you by the balls.” He stopped himself, lit another cigarette.

“The communists save us from that?”

Norfield was taking a drag, but his hand stopped on its way to his mouth, and with a slight, what-a-smart-boy smile, he said, “Might just.”

The pill turned, tide going out, the only salve to his nerves was Charlie Parker again, Norfield setting the needle onto the recording; what had been torment now was hymn. “He’s good when you’re coming down.”

Norfield opened the green door to sunrise, Charlie Parker escaping. Emmett, running his nerves on Parker’s sound, overheard Norfield talk to somebody at the door.

“Good morning, Mr. Farce,” said John Norfield.

The man in the homburg hat stood at the door, a short stocky man in an expensive trench coat; he brought a hand up to scratch his nose. A diamond set in a gold wedding band caught the light. What kind of man wears clothes, jewellery like that? The hat said, “Working late?” He saw Emmett and added, “And who might you be?”

Norfield looked back at Emmett Jones. Gave him a look. Like he’d given him a disease. Like he loved him. “The hat’s a boot,” said Norfield. “Excuse me,” he said and politely closed the door, leaving the hat on the other side. Lifted the needle from Charlie Parker. Quickly turned off the light. Ashen dawn. He hurried to the stacks, took down an old book, frayed and thready, handed the book to Emmett, who stuffed it into the pocket of his jacket. Norfield said, “There’s a door out the back,” guiding Emmett through his small office, his desk and typewriter, past a tiny bathroom with a sink and toilet, to a crooked door at the back of the building.

“Who is that guy?”

Norfield spoke as if he were delivering lines from Nöel Coward. “Everything important in history happens twice, my good fellow. The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. You have just met Mr. Farce.” Norfield’s face was very white. He didn’t look like he had much buzz left in him. “When Mr. Farce wants to hurt you, he does it without leaving a bruise. Trick of a second-rate henchman.”

Emmett watched Norfield lock the back door. When they were standing in the lane, Emmett asked, “Is that guy coming after you, John?”

Norfield’s lips, smile on one side, neat. “You don’t want to know who’s Mr. Tragedy?”

“Sure.”

“Mr. Tragedy is dead. Forget it.”

They walked down the lane. Mr. Farce, quite possibly, following at a polite distance.

 

It took Emmett three days to fall asleep. All in one blow: Suzanne McCallum’s shoulders, John Norfield’s clavicle. Falling in love, loyal forever to that one glimpse of purity you see in somebody, that kind of love, he thought, is a question of instinct, a move you make before thinking, and it changes everything in a split second.

He remembered later, how he’d stammered over the jazz. Ever since Germany, he told John, he’d been lonely, yearning to go back, to belong to a greater sum, flying in a squadron, to experience power, the bliss of pure action, pure intention. Blooded, that’s what the air marshal had called it when he sent his boys out to bomb an easy target, you’ll be well blooded. You’re immortal in action. “Experience,” Emmett had said to Norfield, “cuts, it cuts into you.” He had wanted to say, Experience is love. He’d wanted to be that pilot again, to live in the sky. He slipped a novel back into the shelf, and as he did so, its paper jacket sliced his thumb.

Whatever drug it was that Norfield had given Emmett made him feel exquisitely mortal; he could feel his life, he could feel time running through his veins like a river of light, throwing him into the future. He said, “I’ve got to let the past go. We all do, we have to forget or we’ll go crazy, brother.” It was the first time he’d said “brother.”

“Selective,” Norfield had said. “Believe me. You’ve gotta be selective about what you remember, if you want to carry on.”

 

Chapter Four

Emmett discovered that Suzanne McCallum was in one of his classes. Funny, he hadn’t been aware of her right away. After meeting her at Norfield’s party two weeks ago, he wondered how he’d cross paths with her again; then there she was in Shakespeare, a golden girl. He sat at the back of the lecture hall, where he could look at her. Her straight back, a fine line of will and beauty, leaning to her book, intensely taking notes. Miranda, daughter of Prospero.

He began to watch for her everywhere. He’d spot her in a crowd, often with several men. He liked the way Suzanne walked; for all her elegance, a bit undone, taking big, uneven strides. He was moved by her gawky determination and unselfconsciousness, like she’d always be a girl. Soon, he intercepted her in the hall, hovered over her, and was disappointed by how casually she agreed to go for a walk with him. How eager she was to talk about Norfield. “You have a kind, handsome face,” she told him. “John Norfield is gorgeous and probably bad.” She said that she had to meet some friends, and blithely departed, “See you in Shakespeare,” her skirt swaying around her long legs.

He was disappointed. Not only did she obviously prefer Norfield, but she’d spoken glibly about an encounter that had seared him, left him obsessed. He couldn’t stop thinking about them, Suzanne and Norfield. Even Emmett’s face, with its wire-framed spectacles, the fair hair combed straight back, his forehead, nose, and chin in a golden ratio, this pleasantly honest face seemed displaced in his own mind by John Norfield’s slender, sardonic good looks. The man had made an impression on him.

In the warm splendour of that autumn he tried to rid himself of Norfield’s occupation by dropping in on him at his bookstore, meet him face to face. To split up with him, he thought.

Norfield’s bookstore was different by day, shabbier, cramped by bigger buildings. Emmett walked right by it once, then he retraced his steps and finally saw the painted sign: Norfield & Norfield. There was a shining Triumph motorcycle parked on the street out front, and when he pushed open the door, there was a bell’s bright peal that he hadn’t heard before and the rainy light of the store’s interior, the smell of paper in mouldering leather bindings.

Norfield emerged from behind the counter to greet him with obvious pleasure, embraced him, lightly slapped his cheek. “Where’ve you been?”

Emmett shrugged. “Hitting the books.” Nothing to report. Except that I see you so constantly in my mind’s eye, I feel like I’ve taken on your features. He pointed toward the window, to the sign there. “Didn’t see the name of your store in the dark the other night.”

Norfield scratched lightly at the side of his mouth. “My brother and me.” He smiled, resolute, ironic. “It keeps him in mind.”

Emmett watched Norfield’s mouth. “Is that your motorcycle?”

Norfield nodded absently and then seemed struck by a new idea. “Hey,” he said, “I was talking about you with a friend of mine, just the other day.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Told him you’re a bright guy. I told him, if you were to call him, he should definitely talk to you, you’re all right.”

Emmett looked for imperfections in John Norfield: not merely the small scars — they added to his beauty — imperfections of spirit, of integrity. He said, “Listen. Any chance you could close shop for a while, get some lunch or something, go for a beer?”

Norfield put his hand on Emmett’s shoulder. “You listen. You should definitely talk to this guy.”

“What about?”

Norfield said, “Politics,” smiling as if this were joke, or a code. He reached for and then lit a cigarette before adding, “He’s a Jewish fellow. A survivor. You got any problem with that?”

“Of course not.”

“Hungarian Jew. Nazis picked him up in ’44.”

Outside in the sunlight, someone had stopped to look through the dusty window. Norfield was distracted, staring out the window through cigarette smoke, saying, “Smart cookie. Speaks perfect English.” He turned his eyes on Emmett, a searing effect. “He survived a camp.”

Emmett felt the chance to come close to Norfield, to actually know him and be known, slip away. His disappointment felt unworthy. He said, “Sure. Give me his number.”

The curtain behind the counter was pulled aside and there stood Suzanne McCallum. “Hello, Emmett.”

She wore a white cardigan clasped with a short string of pearls at her throat, a matching sweater underneath, and some amazing kind of brassiere. When she came around the counter, he saw that her feet were bare, the toenails painted red. She shook his hand, her overly firm grasp, beaming at him, possessed by her own beauty. She stood beside Norfield, letting her arm touch his sleeve. Norfield brusquely pulled away, twisting aside to reach for an ashtray. Emmett saw pain, pain passing through Suzanne, quick as a needle.

 

Chapter Five

Emmett knocked, the door opened a crack, and he was examined by a sad brown eye. He could smell, even from the dingy hall, socks, the rank pong of young men, and sweetish garbage, cigarettes, burnt coffee. Leonard of the sad eyes — different from Norfield in every way: burly, hairy, older, though like Norfield, Leonard embraced him and called him “man.”

Leonard Fischer spoke English with a strange accent, a hybrid of Hungary and New York. He ushered Emmett into a one-room suite to introduce him with a wave of the hand to half a dozen students, some of whom Emmett recognized from his classes. There was one woman among them, lovely and dark-haired.

It looked like a smoky, offbeat university seminar. Students strewn about on the floor or the bed, in the one upholstered chair. A sink full of scummy water, an icebox, a hot plate, books stacked on the floor or piled on shelves of two-by-sixes and bricks; magazines, newspapers, clippings, a chrome hubcap that served as an ashtray, out-of-date calendars with pictures of sexy girls wearing American sailor hats, 1942. It was grubby, and indicated a sense of anti-style, detritus, broken kitsch. The one artful object was a framed pencil drawing of a Junker 88 bomber, Luftwaffe; Emmett stumbled over someone’s foot, drawn toward it.

He felt Leonard’s hand on his shoulders, smelled coffee on Leonard’s breath as Leonard spoke into his ear, a warm current of compassion: “Sit, my friend, why don’t you,” the thick fingers pressing him down. He landed beside the dark-haired girl; her full upper lip, black, abundant hair curling around her shoulders, her round arms. Leonard said, “My cousin Rachel. Touch and die.” Then he laughed.

Leonard had a compact body, a dense, compressed mass. He never sat, he paced, blowing his nose into a blue handkerchief, saying little, while the young men in the room did most of the talking, glancing at Leonard for approval. Their conversation was intense, in what seemed like a special language. Emmett felt the envy of an outsider. He heard what seemed like magic phrases — the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, dialectical materialism, the inevitability of communism, the workers’ democracy — and he was embarrassed at having been so narrowly preoccupied with his own small concerns, his new loves, his abstract study of Shakespeare and British history. These young men and lovely Rachel seemed to be entranced by something brutal. “The bourgeoisie is incompetent and unfit to rule,” pronounced one of the earnest students; “We must create a stateless, classless society,” his eyes darting to Leonard to see if he’d made an impression. Leonard wasn’t listening; he didn’t see or didn’t care that the others needed his approval. But Emmett felt the words ricochet through him, tantalizing, challenging his most cautious instincts. We must create a stateless, classless society . To dare to consider this — no state. He was struck by the notion that here was an idea, an ideal, grand enough to help him evade the fate of the vet who can’t recover from the war. To rid himself of the state that had made him its dupe, a murderer.

The window in Leonard Fischer’s single room looked down at a park. Leonard slowed there and looked out, as if restlessly hungering for things outside. He called Emmett over and asked, “You know what that is?” pointing down to the park. A man wearing a white shirt without a tie strolled slowly across an expanse of grass, his muscular body full of health, his empty hands swinging at his sides. “Boredom,” Leonard said. “Beautiful, peaceful boredom. The kind of boredom we can only dream of, working in the capitalists’ machinery. Becoming machines.” Emmett was aware of a sudden lull in the students’ conversation while they strained to overhear Leonard, who was pulling Emmett’s head close, his voice softly rumbling, “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” He squeezed Emmett’s neck. “Walter Benjamin wrote that.” Emmett admitted he didn’t know who Walter Benjamin was. “You speak German?” Leonard asked quite indifferently — he was obviously a good teacher; he had a way of asking questions that permitted ignorance.

Emmett admitted that no, he did not speak German. The memory of molten fire beneath his plane, flames from a burning German city, sizzled into his mind and down into his gut, a choking sensation that augured weeping. But he was okay, he was calm. He didn’t know what John Norfield had told Leonard but guessed that John had relayed nothing of his breaking down that first night they’d met, and nothing about the air force. He wanted to present Leonard with something. “I speak Japanese,” he said.

Leonard laughed, deep and phlegmy. “That, my friend, would put you on the far side of the planet.” He gripped Emmett’s head between his hands and made as if to throw it, as if his head were a football, a loving gesture. “Glad to know you.”

Leonard’s cousin Rachel brushed her dark hair from her eyes and gave Emmett a scornful look.

 

Chapter Six

Emmett Jones was reading Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. And there, in the first chapter of the first thing he’d ever read by Marx, he discovered the source for John Norfield’s mysterious and witty aphorism that night they had first met. “All great world-historic facts and personages appear twice . . . the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.”

Emmett was surprised to discover Herr Marx so lively and sardonic. He wondered what the old philosopher would make of him, and of the students lounging on the floor of Leonard’s apartment, and imagined that Marx would burst into laughter at the comfortable Canadian communists.

He was amazed at the power of Marx’s memory, his visceral grasp of history and economics, witty, caustic. Reading this stuff made him feel again the exquisite sensation of time running through him, a river of light passing, almost painful, joyful in a ruthless sort of way.

Light travels six and a half trillion miles in a year, which was a fact that had stuck in his head from his schooldays; the stars’ explosions hurling light. Light from the eighteenth century, from the French Revolution, that very light is striking earth now. Late from the homesick stars. The world is belated. An uncanny homelessness resides in things: a button with a bit of white thread lying on the windowsill in the sun, abandoned in the river of time.

What did she tell him, Sachiko, his father’s mistress, in her female, singsong Japanese? She said, “Mono no aware ni kizuku.” Be aware of the strangeness of things. Her melodious platitude, “Mono no aware o satoru.” Be light-stricken as the world is light-stricken, be time-stricken as the world is time-stricken.

This was a Japanese cliché. She might have been saying, Wake up and smell the coffee. And besides, weren’t the Japanese light-stricken? Now weren’t they just as stricken as they could be? A great white brutal light.

Emmett’s father’s constant mistress, Sachiko, a silk cocoon, was the estranged wife of a diplomat stationed in Australia, which is where she’d learned English. She had a young daughter who had stayed in Australia because she’d chosen her father over her mother when they divorced. Sachiko never apologized for living so far from her child, but even as a boy Emmett could sense her dissatisfaction, her unhappy boredom, her pessimism. Emmett was a restless kid who discovered stillness visiting her, staring at her where she reclined, like fate, he thought, pleased with his own intellect. He thought, She has the body of a woman but the soul of a man.

Sachiko wasn’t old then, he knew that now, but she was older than his mother, she coated her face in rice powder. She reclined on a chaise longue in the sunroom at the back of the house in Shioya, at James-yama Estate. Not her house: the house Emmett’s father leased on her behalf, a short walk from the house he leased for his wife and son. His father travelled between the two women, and the younger Jones travelled too. At that time in his life, young Emmett exercised disloyalty to his mother as he exercised his body — healthily, casually cruel. He loved his mother, she was his first friend, but the pain that he inflicted on her confirmed him as separate, with separate will. Anyway, his mother’s weakness proved that she deserved to be betrayed, as if he could uproot his own potential for weakness by hurting her.

There was nothing to do at Sachiko’s house, and Emmett never took a schoolmate there with him. But he liked to go to sit with her, straddling a footstool to be near her, lying on his stomach to drag his boy-limbs over the Chinese carpet, mesmerized by boredom. Sachiko never felt obliged to talk or to read or even to embroider. She sat like a clock.

He preferred the way his family lived, in two houses, with two very different women, and he pitied his friends’ conventional arrangements, preferring his father’s courtly handshakes to ordinary fathers’ hugs and feint punches; the other fathers’ tussles and bad jokes seemed desperate, stupid. His father was tall, as tall as Emmett was now; he was dignified and self-reliant; he was never compelled to explain himself but kept his own counsel.

When his father contracted TB, his mother tried not to let anyone know. It seemed to shame her even more than his having a mistress did — or his mother used the shame of TB as surrogate for the shame she felt over the mistress. TB was widespread in Japan, yet it was also a source of deep disgrace. When Emmett began to show symptoms, she took him out of the country so suddenly he never had a chance to say goodbye.

He was sixteen. There’d been a small incident, a rift between him and his father. Emmett had taken a job on the estate, gardening work, cleaning yards. His boss was an old retired British field marshal. One day, the old man complained to Emmett’s father about Emmett’s “shoddy” work. In response, his father had, coldly furious, told Emmett that he’d “failed him,” he’d said that he was “disappointed” in such a son; he’d gone on at some length, declaring that because Emmett was so lazy, he was bound to fail in life. His father was a thoroughly rational man and he had a thoroughly rational way of articulating his disgust.

Emmett was bitterly hurt. His work had been shoddy that one time; the old Brit had been right. Emmett sulkily avoided his father for weeks. Even when he knew that his father was really ill, Emmett held out, he never entered the darkened bedroom to see him. Then Emmett’s mother swept him out of the country. He’d never had a chance to make things right with the man whom he loved beyond everyone. It had been a stupid argument. He would never see his father again.

When he got out of the sanatorium in Vancouver, his mother moved with him into a house there, insisting it was too dangerous for them to return home. Emmett didn’t have any money of his own, and he couldn’t make contact with Japan because it was wartime; he was kept by his mother. When his father was reported dead, Emmett, guilty, angry, enlisted in the RAF. His mother suffered a fatal heart attack while he was in the war. At the time, he refused to mourn. Under the circumstances, flying night raids as he was then, grief would have tripped him up. He stored grief in his bones. Rage inspired him, sharpened his sight, his mind, setting fire to the German cities and towns. A delicious hatred of the enemy gave him courage. He was proving — to his dead father — that he would not fail.

Grief leached out of him now. As the excitement of the war receded, grief seemed to release itself in waves that washed back over him, shaking him so deeply he might fall to his knees, just as he’d done that night in Norfield’s bookstore. A fit of weeping could overcome him on a streetcar, or as he bent over to tie his shoe. He wept in his sleep, awakening wet with tears. He learned that grief is a medley of rage, pity, regret, and hunger, starvation; he was starving for his father, to see him again, to hear his voice, to be forgiven.

He couldn’t afford to regret what he’d done in Bomber Command, it would cost him too much. It had been blind, well blooded, obedient action. A luscious poison in his veins that had won the commander’s praise. The bombing, all that burning was too great, much too great. Regret would destroy him. He had to redeem his life.

When he recalled his father, it was often a memory of the man angrily turning away from him; the image of his father turning his back recurred in Emmett’s mind obsessively. Turning his back in disgust or, Emmett wondered now, turning his back out of his own sense of inadequacy, a man who had failed his family. Emmett began to see mortality there, in a memory of the lonely shape of the living man. Maybe his father had been uncertain, unhappy, driven by fears and desires he couldn’t control. A man who’d chosen to live outside the normal family strictures, seeking a certain self-invention and finding himself trapped, failing.

 

Chapter Seven

Emmett thought about Suzanne McCallum almost all the time. Her skin, her blue eyes, her confident stride, her place in the world. A rich man’s daughter from Forest Hill, Toronto.

Suzanne was seeing John Norfield. A poet. A communist, or so he claimed. Compelling in a way that Emmett never could be. Norfield seemed to know everything; he could remember the names of every revolutionary, every philosopher, writer, and artist who had ever lived. Emmett didn’t know anyone else who knew so many names, and he was impressed. John never again spoke directly about Hong Kong; he talked about oppression, the violence of the state, and they argued over the differences between German and Japanese fascism. Emmett listened to the slightly British cadence and thought, It’s Toronto aristocrat.

Of his several new friends so affected by the war, Emmett was the only one who had killed. And he had killed, or helped to kill, tens of thousands. He had seen too much. Yes, the eyes are nerve endings.

In the company of his friends, Emmett felt a weight taken from him, a lessening of anxiety and tedium, and a new radiance, an ideal. If anybody had asked him in 1946 what he believed in, he might have said communism. A grand idea, a sublime system that would eliminate war and poverty, create a true democracy, stateless, without manipulation, no Bomber Command murdering civilians. Airplanes flew over the city, carrying not bombs but passengers. He looked up at the planes’ underbellies and felt starved, abandoned, thirsting.

Four years ago, the Japanese police reported that his father had jumped out of the window of the police station. Emmett doubted this was true. His father would have been very sick with TB then. The police would be happy to get rid of a foreigner infected with the disease, especially a westerner who was intimate with a Japanese woman. He must have been pushed. It was wartime, a time for killing. The police would have pushed him to his death without giving it much thought.

Passenger planes droned overhead. The city was growing; houses were going up for the returned vets having families. He hated the way the small hours of peace needed tending. “Peace is relentless,” Emmett once said, realizing too late how terrible it was to say this to Leonard. Leonard, his sorrowful brown eyes filled with mockery, dryly responding, “Take arsenic, why don’t you. Put yourself out of your misery.”

With the war over, sex was again indexed to real estate —that’s what Leonard said. “A wife,” Leonard argued, “is private property, a slave to her husband. Who in turn is a slave to his banker and his boss.” Somehow it all could be traced back to domesticated farm animals, according to Leonard, who said he’d learned this from Friedrich Engels, but Emmett wasn’t clear how it all worked. Leonard patiently explained. “The vets are breeding like rabbits. But unlike rabbits, they must breed with only one rabbit for their whole lives, which actually sounds okay with me. That way, the male rabbit knows for sure that the baby bunnies are his when he wants to write his last will and testament. The women and children are his slaves, but he’s their slave too. The war might be kaput, but the soldiers are still in service. Pretty soon, they stop thinking altogether. Just hump and then work like crazy to feed all those kids.”

Leonard was always agitated during their conversations about sex and communism. “Fucking is the original division of labour,” he liked to say. Emmett understood that this obsession was partly because Leonard didn’t have a lover and would obviously very much like to have one. This made their discussions unsettling, Leonard vulgar in one moment and sentimental the next.

Emmett, reading Marx’s The German Ideology, was weary of Marx’s style, that hectoring voice. Toronto wasn’t ripe for revolution. He noticed that Leonard’s disciples were often quoting the people whom Marx was satirizing, getting it backward. Leonard’s cousin Rachel, for example, liked to rub Emmett’s earlobes between her forefinger and her thumb, a perfectly sensuous and sisterly fondling, resting her satin bosom against his chest and in a milky mezzo she would drawl, “My life is a continuous process of liberation.”

Emmett thought that the Toronto communists were a hip club, a costume party. But thanks to Leonard Fischer and John Norfield, he had a life again, and he was elated. “O Mensch! Gib Acht! Was spricht die tiefe Mitternacht?” Leonard said. “Ich schlief, ich schlief — aus tiefem Traum bin ich erwarcht.” O Man, take heed! What says the deep midnight? I slept, I slept — from a deep dream have I awoken.

Leonard Fischer’s references, like his accent, were adopted from the US — the Bomb, the military budget, the arms trade. Leonard talked a lot about racial hatred in the South, while the Holocaust could be mentioned only in terms of redemption, as proof for the necessity of “revolution.” Emmett listened in silence to Leonard and Rachel name the family that had been murdered — exterminated. Rachel’s parents had taken her with them to Canada, to Toronto, in 1933, but everyone else had been rounded up. Leonard’s parents were individually murdered in gas chambers, as were his two sisters, his grandparents, another uncle and his wife, their four children, his cousins, second cousins, friends that Leonard had made in the camp. “One by one, child by child, every day there were less of us. Do you understand?” Leonard said. “Of the six million killed, one and a half million were children. Each one of them died alone.

“Lenin understood,” Leonard said, “he saw it coming, the evil, the beast of anti-Semitism. Lenin knew the nature of the beast. The Germans were bankrupt. They were told to hate the Jew, so they worked overtime, making bullets to kill him. The factory owner will always get rich on fear. Harness hatred and fear, you get very rich. It’s exactly what Lenin predicted. The nightmare came true.”

Leonard yearned to go to Russia, utopia, a classless society. The Russians had “cleaned up” Eastern Europe. Leonard claimed that Stalin was a good friend of the Jews. Emmett didn’t argue with him very much on this point because he loved Leonard and knew that Leonard needed to believe in someone, and because Emmett himself wanted a world without any kind of state at all, no Stalin, no Truman, no generals and prime ministers, no ministers of war.

For Leonard, the Communist Party was a revolutionary party. Communism suggested bliss for both of them, but for Emmett it was more diffuse, more gradual than Leonard’s dream of overthrowing the existing state of things. Emmett admired Leonard’s belief, but he had to say, “I don’t see it, Leonard, I don’t see a revolution happening in Toronto.”

“Then I’m going to Russia,” said Leonard.

 

Chapter Eight

On a morning of first snowfall, cars schussing past, snow clinging to the underside of wet boughs, Emmett walked to his favourite bakery. He was trying to imagine an entirely different arrangement, overthrowing the existing state of things in Toronto. The owner of the bakery was a woman in late middle age with floury hair and buttery skin, rosy as apple pie. Snow parachuted down around him on a street fragrant with warm bread. Hushed, on the sidewalk with its few people, a pretty young woman smiled at him. The day splayed north toward solstice.

Though Emmett had been speaking only English for more than ten years, his Japanese was still good enough to get him a job translating Japanese documents from the Taisho period for a professor at the University of Toronto, a scholar of Asian history. It paid well, and he could choose his own hours. He’d switched from studying British history to studying Japanese and Chinese history, becoming one of a small group of students interested in Asia. The Canadian government was paying for his education because he was a vet. An untouchable, one of Bomber Command, he would earn no medals, but he did get free tuition. Snow lit his rooms where he worked in the afternoon, fostering a deep addiction to privacy. Privacy, not solitude.

He felt incomprehensible, and so he didn’t, he couldn’t, begin to make himself clearly known to anyone. It happened every time, when a conversation would come around inevitably to self-definition, he’d be tongue-tied — or, rather, bored, as if by a too-difficult calculation. His life had been contrary, a series of duplications: two homes; a father who’d dominated and also abandoned him; heroic war service that was also the shame of his nation. He had no words for himself. He felt like an empty room without light, but for the borrowed light from his friends and the radiance of their ideals.

He did not want to be bourgeois, this thing Marx loathed venomously, but he liked to wear a tie. He liked to feel superior to other men, he was competitive — though he had no appetite for business, preferring quieter work; he knew he could never make a living in sales. Passenger planes flew overhead. The city shucked off its drab wartime camouflage; money was evident in the new cars, the busy restaurants and bars. He agreed with Marx that power is something inhuman, manipulative, indifferent, mocking the sacrifice he’d made, bombing civilians. He admitted to himself that he’d been duped. It would never happen again.

By now, seven months after meeting John Norfield and Leonard Fischer, Emmett was wary of the Toronto communists. But from his reading of Marx, he’d learned something key, something that would guide him. He thought that the others, Leonard and his acolytes, didn’t understand this, in their doctrinaire absorption of what they thought was communism. It was almost a trick of mind, Marx’s trick, whereby a man could disaffect from what Marx called “the dead generations” that weigh “like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” Emmett chose to train himself to live without belonging because belonging to anything, any sort of human community, requires a certain costuming, a borrowed language that thus makes a man a caricature.

Toronto was not ripe for revolution. But Emmett Jones had set out on a discipline that was revolutionary; he would strip away self-deception — and this discipline, he knew, would take constant practice, would necessarily comprise his very being. He would always have to make himself new.

 

Chapter Nine

Leonard Fischer’s bachelor suite. Leonard at the window, looking down at the park where the man wearing a white shirt tucked into dark trousers ambled across the grass, his big empty hands swaying at his side. Emmett and John Norfield joined Leonard at the window. A cold summer, an early fall. Curled yellow leaves drifted softly from the ash trees. No one said anything. Then Leonard grumbled, “Same asshole.”

It occurred to Emmett that the man had a routine, that he got off work and walked home across the park.

Leonard turned to John Norfield. “You know who he is, John?”

Norfield waited, and then he said, “No.” Everything fell into that gap, that almost kindly pause Norfield had permitted before lying to his friends. The man in the white shirt had been present all summer, not only in the park but on the street; wherever John Norfield was, so was the empty-handed man in the white shirt tucked into dark trousers. Norfield must know who he is.

The fellow in the homburg hat — that dandy with the diamond ring — they all knew about him; even the student acolytes knew about him. The Homburg Hat was hometown, he was RCMP, and his surveillance made being a Toronto communist an interesting game, a serious sort of delinquency. But this guy in the shirt, this empty-handed man, he looked real; he didn’t seem Canadian.

Leonard was wheezing, plaintive, “Who he’s working for?” His lungs mewed. He rubbed his face like he’d rub it off. With one sad eye on Norfield, bitterly, tenderly, Leonard said, “How come you’re so important you’ve got somebody always following you, John, huh? Schmuck.”

“C’mon,” Norfield said. “I have some money. Let’s get drunk, shall we?”

“You have some money, do you,” Leonard grumbled, jealous, suspicious. “Lot of money in the book business?”

“I sold a poem,” said Norfield, and Leonard laughed and said, “He sold a poem.”

Emmett knew that Norfield wrote poetry; he’d seen him scribble lines of verse into a black notebook, though John never offered to let him read any of it. Now he looked sideways at John’s fine features and said, “People buy poems?” John gave a surprised laugh and put his arm around Emmett, as if to protect him.

They drank till after dark; they ate fish and chips, then they drank a lot more. The pub was set below the sidewalk with a view of pretty stockings hurrying past.

Leonard grew garrulous with the first four pints and then got morbid, estranged, too lucid. He looked around at the porcelain British bulldogs, their bowlegs, bowties, the red tip of a dog’s tongue at the crease of its black porcelain lips. Gothic stone arches, portraits of Sir Wilson Hidebound, Sir Henry Thirdson. Leonard peered at the brass inscriptions, his pants riding low on his bum. “How can you stand it?” He lurched back to their booth, taking his handkerchief from his pants pocket. “How can you bear being hijacked, fer fugsake? The entire fug-ig country’s just a booby prize for every fraud who couldn’t make it in Egg-land.” He glared at Emmett contemptuously. “It’s one big fug-ig sed-up, this whole country.” He finally blew his nose.

Emmett drank his pint.

“Prove otherwise!” Leonard shouted.

A waiter wearing a white linen napkin tied at his waist stopped at their table, a tray of beer balanced on his forearm.

Emmett said, “There is no otherwise to prove.”

Leonard put his elbows on the table and glowered, “Engage in a dialectical debate, you prick.”

“I’m not going to prove anything to you.”

“Fake British. Fake Victoria. Fake Parliament. Fake country. This whole country’s a fraud. At least the States had the guts to have a revolution.”

“You’re an old woman when you’re drunk.”

“You’re an old woman when you’re sober, asshole.”

Norfield sighed and adjusted his shirt cuffs. The waiter finally put the beer on the table. Even the waiter felt superior, they all felt superior to one another, in a pretentious little backwater built on mutual contempt. “This is a stupid argument,” Emmett said.

Leonard said, “I want a fug-ig cigarette. I haven’t had a cigarette since I’m fourteen.” He blew his nose again.

Emmett’s finger tracked the foam running down his glass. He was tired of himself. He’d been working long hours, translating between Japanese and English, and now he’d had too much beer. He thought about how hard Japan had tried to keep the British out, to keep a purity that Canada could never know — by definition Canada could never be anything but a mimic.

“There’s this Japanese painting,” Emmett said. “It’s old, this painting. Ancient. Very beautiful.” The brush, loaded with ink, weighted by the blackest ink. “It was painted by a philosopher,” he said. “A Buddhist monk. Hasegawa Tohaku.” In the sixteenth century Hasegawa Tohaku raised his arm, withheld his hand with the brush, then his soul made a decision, his arm descended, he created sentient, silent pine trees in mist.

“I don’t speak Japanese, remember? Hungarian, Yiddish, German, but no Jap.”

“Forget it.”

“Go on,” said Leonard, mopping the sweat on his forehead. “I’m being a boor because I’m tired and drunk and it makes me sad. Go on, say what you must say.”

“I don’t know. It’s pine trees.” Emmett tried to stand up. “And mist.” He sat down again. “It’s like overhearing God or something. The pine trees are conscious.”

The painting was done with a brush of bamboo, broom, with the richest black ink. He wanted to say that the artist had revealed a consciousness in mist, in pine trees, an austere presence. The finest form of purity. Emmett said, “Fleeting. Incredibly delicate. And humble, in a grand way. Majestic and grand, grandly noble, and grandly — remote.”

Leonard dug at his ear.

“You’d know what I mean,” Emmett said, taking up his beer and drinking, “if you could see it.”

Leonard reached for him, “C’mere,” tenderly gripped his head between his hands and whispered, “You’re a fug-ig idealist.” Idealist was a Toronto communist insult.

“Yeah. But it’s a beautiful painting.” Emmett pushed himself upright. “And now. I am going to take a piss.”

“You got it up the ying-yang!” called Leonard after him. “Emmett, my friend!”

Emmett turned around.

“Don’t forget Pearl Harbor.” Leonard rubbed his own heart, repeating sadly, “Never forget it.”

“Why would I forget it?”

“You come from there, right?”

Japan. He shrugged.

Leonard rubbed his chest so hard he popped a button on his shirt. “You make a living, that’s okay, speaking Japanese. Translating. That’s an honourable trade, I know.”

“All I know is, I’ve had seven pints. Eight pints exactly.”

“I know you’re not Japanese, I got eyes, you’re no Jap. But hey, the Japanese are dangerous. I mean it. They’re dangerous.” He made a noise like an airplane smashing into the table, spilling beer everywhere. “Tsk, look at me. Zayt moykhl.” The way he mopped it up with his shirtsleeve, sheepishly, reminded Emmett that Leonard had had a mother, he’d had an older sister, he’d paid attention to them when he was a boy, before they were murdered. “Do whatever you want,” Leonard was saying. “It’s not up to me.”

Emmett turned away. “I’m going to take a leak.”

Leonard sadly dabbed at the beer on the table. “Anyway. America got ’em good.” His mass, the way the new fat sat uncomfortably on a body starved while it was still growing, and a private darkness coming down on him, making Emmett realize again, how much effort it must take Leonard to keep going. He heard Leonard say in a low voice, “We’re unforgiveable.”

Emmett stopped. He returned to the damp table. “Who is ‘we’?” Leonard was concentrating on the continents of beer on the table. He shook his head. “The living.”

Norfield was quiet all night. When they left the pub, he ducked into an alley and threw up, holding his narrow black tie to the side and missing his shoes. He patted his lips with his handkerchief and remained perfectly groomed, seemingly sober.

They waited for him and started walking again. Leonard laid his hand on Norfield’s shoulder, saying, “John, John,” but Norfield shrugged it off.

“John,” Leonard said again. “There’s your friend in the hat.”

Across the street, the short, well-built man wearing the homburg hat and a fine pearl grey raincoat that caught the light moved through the crowds of pub-crawling students. Mr. Farce. He seemed so securely secret he didn’t imagine himself visible. Emmett stopped walking and stared. Norfield, with a cigarette between his lips, took his arm and said, “Walk,” pulling him forward.

Four or five blocks later, they parted company. Norfield said he had work to do, and left them, calling goodnight over his shoulder.

Emmett couldn’t go home — he was renting the third floor of a house off College; the widow downstairs would evict him if he came home smelling of liquor. He and Leonard walked on to Leonard’s suite. Leonard was elaborately pessimistic, talking about an uncle who was in trouble in New York. He said he’d lived there with him, with his uncle and aunt, who took him in when he first left Europe after liberation, and now his uncle was in trouble. He recited a poem about a star called Antares, a long, moody, complicated poem he said he wrote when he was a kid. He said he should go see his uncle, but he couldn’t because he’d be arrested, “and what use would I be to anybody then?” He said, “This place is going to kill me. It’s a big fug-ig pawnshop. Look! I’m falling south! I’m falling all the way to America!”

The streets of Toronto fall south to the lake. Sleety rain fell, the wind gusting. Emmett took Leonard’s arm and they ran north into the wind, Leonard wheezing and the gutters filled with rain and yellow leaves roiling down, the slick road going blue.

 

Chapter Ten

When Emmett woke up in the only armchair in Leonard’s suite, Leonard was seated at the end of his cot studying him. Emmett had a life-threatening hangover and broke out in a sweat as soon as he opened his eyes. Looking at Leonard’s droopy face didn’t help. It was barely day. The room stank like always. Leonard said, “I have to leave the country.”

Emmett said, “Goodbye then,” and closed his eyes. He, too, thought about getting away, going nine or ten pints back into his recent history. He sweated alcohol, he would never, ever drink again. “You told me you can’t cross the border. You said they’d arrest you. Please go to sleep, Leonard.” He heard Leonard try to breathe through his congestion and added, “I’m sorry, man.”

Leonard stood up, the smell of weariness coming off him, gamy, friendly. “You want the bed? I can’t sleep. Take the bed.”

Emmett could hear him dumping coffee grounds into the sewage sitting in his sink. His heart was pounding so bad he’d never get back to sleep, especially on Leonard’s sweaty flannel sheets. He said, “I don’t understand why you’d go to jail. If you cross the border.”

“Long story.”

“I’ve got a few minutes. I’m composing my obituary.”

The coffee pot on the hot plate, the smell of electricity. “My uncle,” Leonard stopped to blow his nose, “studied to be an electrical engineer. This is in Munich. Immigrates to the States when he’s eighteen years old. This is 1914. Marries an American, my Aunt Miriam. Works his ass off. Loves America, loves America. You heard this story.”

“No I haven’t.”

Leonard went to look out his window. He said, “In 1940, he’s been in America for twenty-six years, he’s already over forty. Then Congress passes this thing, this Alien Thing. Right? Everybody, Jews, Germans, everybody who’s not American has to write a letter of explanation to President Roosevelt. The FBI doesn’t like his letter. They watch him. They sit outside his house, they tail him when he goes to work, they open his mail, I bet they tapped his phone. They watched him like hawks all through the war. Then I show up. He finds me through the Red Cross and gets me sent to him. I’m staying with him and Aunt Miriam in New York. He tells the FBI, this boy is my nephew from Hungary, leave him alone. They don’t believe him. They think I’m a German, faking it. My uncle. A very smart man who never had a chance. Breaks my heart. Still.”

Leonard placed a cup of coffee on the arm of Emmett’s chair; Emmett felt its heat and opened his eyes. The early daylight hadn’t yet committed to sun or cloud-cover.

“Don’t burn yourself with this coffee,” Leonard warned. His voice sounded forced, like bad acting. He went to the window. Then he made an elaborate show of tiptoeing over to the radio, turning it up loud, then tiptoeing in his oversized shoes back to the window, where he waved Emmett to come over. Emmett pulled himself up and went to stand beside Leonard at the window.

In the null dawn, the man in a white shirt tucked into dark trousers strolled across the park below, his empty hands swinging at his sides.

Leonard put his finger to the side of his nose. Emmett asked, “Who is that guy?”

Leonard had a sort of rubber face; he could make a frown like a huge smile upside down. “Fugged if I know.” He tapped his nose again. “But my money’s on him being Norfield’s handler.”

He wondered if Leonard was setting him up, playing him for a patsy. He turned the radio off and in a normal voice, he said, “What’s a ‘handler,’ Leonard?”

Leonard took Emmett’s face between his hands. Emmett braced himself for a kiss, but Leonard whispered in his ear, “Soviets.” He shoved Emmett’s head away, squinting to gauge his impact. Again, the warm hands either side of his head, and Leonard whispered, “Norfield’s got himself in deep.”

He tiptoed to the door, held it open till Emmett passed through, locked it behind them, didn’t say another word for a half-hour, shushed Emmett when he tried to speak, kept him walking till they reached the rail line north of Dupont. It was a lukewarm morning, no wind or sun or rain. Emmett was confined in his alcohol-poisoned body. “I honestly have to rest.” He sat on the track.

Leonard heaved himself down beside him, then scoped the area and asked, “Want me to finish the story?”

“Sure.”

“My uncle, he could’ve talked himself into Eleanor Roosevelt’s panties. More American than Henry Ford. And he told me to talk like him when they come to interview me so they can choose if they’re going to let us stay in America. Which I tried. Maybe I tried too hard. But a European Jew? They thought we were eradicated, they come looking again and again, they want to see this talking animal. They come to the house. They interview my uncle for hours. He wants me to go away, go up to Canada, but I can’t, I can’t leave him. The FBI go away, they come back, they interview me for six hours, it goes on like this six days.”

“Why?”

“They said he was a spy.”

“God, I’m sorry, Leonard.”

“Don’t feel sorry for me.”

“I don’t.”

“Well don’t.”

“Okay.”

A train was coming. Leonard stood up and brushed the dirt off his palms. He looked like a deflated tire, his grimy trousers sagging down beneath his paunch, dragging over his shoes.

They could see the train in the distance, could feel it in the tracks.

Leonard said, “My uncle was passing information to the Russians.”

“What?”

“You think he was a tailor? Hey? Some kind of small-time schmuck? He was a scientist! It never occurred to you? He never stopped learning. Ever. Yes. A Jew from Munich, that they never let him forget. He loved America. So much he wouldn’t let her destroy herself.”

They stood close to the tracks while the train passed, its panicky clamour turning nostalgic in the distance. Leonard was mumbling. Emmett asked him to repeat it. Leonard shook his head and said, “Not in your sorry life.”

The sky was finally going to give rain. They started to walk again. Leonard said, “Anyway, you heard me. He gave information to the Russians.”

“What kind of information?”

“I don’t know. He wouldn’t tell me. So I had nothing to tell the FBI.”

Six days of interviews with nothing to tell. “It wasn’t your fault, Leonard.”

“Sure.”

“None of it was your fault.”

“I loved my uncle. I worshipped him.”

He’d always considered Leonard old. Now he realized, Leonard was younger than he was by several years.

“Ask me where my uncle is, at this present time,” Leonard said.

“Okay. Where’s your uncle?”

“About thirty, forty miles north of New York. A place called Sing Sing.”

“Jesus. For how long is he supposed to be in there?”

“Life.”

“Life? That’s terrible. God, it must be terrible for your aunt.”

“I’ve gotta go.”

“To New York?”

“To Moscow.”

“Moscow, Russia?”

“Moscow is in Russia, asshole.” Leonard gripped Emmett’s arm and spun him around. “You think I’m just an unhappy Jew. You think I’m depressed, is that right? Sad old Leonard Fischer had an awful time in the war. You think what happened to us hurt my feelings?”

He saw that Leonard was capable of hating him, and he felt a surge of respect. Leonard needed ecstasy, they both did, they’d been made addicts, there was no other way to get over the war but to obliterate themselves in something grand, sublime. Addiction is nostalgia for lost happiness. Again Emmett said he was sorry. “But I don’t understand. How are you going to get to Moscow? What would you do if you ever got there?”

“Work. I’m not saying much to you, Emmett. What you don’t know won’t hurt you. But I’ll tell you — they’ve been waiting. Hoping I’d come over. Any more than that, you don’t want to know. Norfield’s not the only one with something to offer. I’m no spy. But I can work. And I believe.” His eyes filled with tears again. “I’ll miss you.” He remembered that they were likely being followed and looked around hopefully. “I’ll go wherever they need me. Moscow, Leningrad, maybe a farming village by the Black Sea, who knows? I see myself driving a tractor!”

They approached Leonard’s suite, then Emmett would walk on. The man in the white shirt was outside Leonard’s building now, standing with his hands at his side. Leonard stopped so suddenly, Emmett bumped into him. Leonard’s voice trembled. “Look,” he said. “Do me a favour.”

“Of course.”

Leonard fumbled in his pants to produce a black leather wallet and from that a key. “My spare. Take it, will you, man?”

“Why?”

“I might have to leave some stuff. My books. I can’t take them, it’s just too many. They’re valuable.”

“They’re also illegal.”

“My books? There’s no law against them. You’re thinking of Quebec. In Quebec, they’d put you in jail. Here, it’s okay. You think I’d put you in such jeopardy? Never, never in my life would I do anything to harm you.” Leonard wiped tears from his eyes and blew his nose. “Wait a while and go get them. Will you?”

“Whatever you want.”

“I’ll pay rent here for another three months, ahead. You can wait. It’ll be safe.”

The man in the white shirt stood just across the street, waiting at the door to Leonard’s apartment building. He met Emmett’s eye with a blank gaze. Leonard started to walk toward him, backward, talking, “Just go in there, like in November. Nobody’s going to be waiting around in November. And get my books.”

“Wait a minute.” He couldn’t let Leonard go. “How am I going to know you’re okay?”

Leonard was across the street. “Store my books someplace. Someplace they won’t think of looking.”

“I don’t trust that guy.” The man heard and didn’t respond, and his stony indifference angered Emmett.

“Put them in your girlfriend’s house.”

“What girlfriend?” Emmett stood in the middle of street. The whole city seemed deserted. Except for a car parked down the way, the driver turning the ignition and driving slowly toward them.

Leonard said, “Take them to her house. They won’t look there. When it’s safe, sell them. Give the money to my cousin Rachel.”

The man in the white shirt climbed the few stairs up to the front door of Leonard’s apartment building and held the door open, waiting for Leonard to go in. Leonard said, “I’ll get word back to you somehow. From Russia.” Then he took the stairs two at a time. Emmett had never seen him move so athletically.

The car crept up to the front of the building, the driver looking toward Leonard, who turned as he was entering the building, and Emmett could see the boyish zeal, he heard the thrill in Leonard’s voice when he called out, “Live a good life, Emmett,” and disappeared inside.

 

Chapter Eleven

The man in the white shirt vanished along with Leonard. In November, when Emmett went back to Leonard’s building, he met only one man, in the hallway outside Leonard’s suite, a Polish fellow, a carpenter still wearing his tool belt, who explained in a loud, heavily accented voice that he always came home for lunch. They’d engaged in praise of Campbell’s Tomato Soup, the man standing with his key ready to open the door to his suite, which was beside Leonard’s. Emmett had never run into him before, over the months when he attended Leonard’s meetings. The Polish fellow was about to go into his suite to heat his tomato soup when he asked, “You know where he’s gone? Your Jewish friend.”

“His aunt is sick.”

“Good.”

“Yes.”

“A sick aunt.”

They each had a key in their respective locks. Emmett opened Leonard’s door and picked up the empty wooden crate he’d brought.

The fellow said, “You’re taking some things from there?”

“Yes.”

The bonhomie disappeared and reappeared very quickly, then he burst forth with admiration of young fellows who like to read, he himself not being much of a bookworm but good with his hands. Emmett backed into the suite, thinking, I really like Poles, his head so filled with books he didn’t wonder how the carpenter knew it was indeed books he was there to remove from Leonard’s apartment.

The crate was too heavy. He unpacked it and carried a loose armful to the car, climbed back upstairs, made several trips up the four flights of stairs. Suzanne sat in the driver’s seat, looking straight ahead. This stillness was her camouflage. He came down with his last load, closed the trunk, and got in beside her. There were times when she seemed to him a gauzy transparency. He believed that she was pure of heart, a quality that didn’t preclude her from being his very own catastrophe. Suzanne was in love with John; he could tell by the hallowed way she said his name.

A beige Chrysler turned onto Leonard’s street and was making its way toward them when it pulled over to the curb and parked. The driver was a woman. But he said, “Turn around.”

“What?”

“Make a U-turn.”

She did, with ease, though she gave it too much gas and backed up too close to the curb and with so much weight in the trunk, she scraped the rear fender of her father’s silver Bentley. “Damn,” she said. “Now I’ll have to make up a story.”

“Tell him you were loaded with revolutionary literature and hit a curb escaping the RCMP.”

She was trembling. “He’ll blame John.”

“Look, I’m sorry I got you involved.”

“With what? With John?” It was supposed to be a joke, flirtatious teasing.

Emmett said, “Anyway, thanks for helping my friend.”

She bit her lip. “These books are illegal, aren’t they?”

“Not here. Only in Quebec.”

She didn’t look convinced but added nervously, “It’s not like we’re hiding a dead body.” She gripped the big wheel of the Bentley till her knuckles were white. “When’s he coming back? Your friend.” Suzanne had never met Leonard. She wanted small talk. “Is his aunt going to die?”

“I don’t know.” Emmett couldn’t store Leonard’s books in his rented rooms on the third floor of the widow’s house because she snooped; he knew she did, he could smell her talcum as soon as he opened his door. Leonard’s idea was good, probably safe, hiding the books at Suzanne’s father’s house. The McCallum place would be vast; he imagined many forgotten recesses thick with cobwebs. He thought they’d store Leonard’s contraband with the great-grandmother’s wedding dress and relics from the Boer War.

They arrived at the McCallum estate in the early afternoon. Three ancient maples stood at the gate, still in leaf, a radiant gold; the pool was drained, revealing a lotus blossom made of lapis lazuli in its marble basin; the junipers were wrapped in yellow burlap.

She parked the Bentley in a stable converted into a garage. It smelled of straw and motor oil. Six English saddles sat on wood beams covering one wall. An oak cabinet with nuts and bolts, nails of differing sizes, everything labelled. He felt abruptly homesick for his childhood at the Shioya estate. He’d forgotten the persuasions of wealth. An immaculate 1937 Alfa Romeo was parked beside a new Cadillac, gleaming chrome and leather, as polished and orderly as Japan. Beautiful objects, their magic allure, exempt from mess and happenstance, perfectly maintained. There were no half-empty boxes, no discarded suitcases or shipping crates, no dirty rags, not a speck of dust, no cobwebs, on the entire estate not a fallen leaf, not a twig. An orderly mind — he assumed it was her father’s — had thorough possession of the place.

The stable was chilly. Suzanne opened the Bentley’s trunk and then she, too, seemed to measure the quantity of what they intended to hide against the sheer and total consciousness behind every feature of her parental home. She gave a gasp and blushed. “I don’t know why I thought this would be easy.” Then she slammed the trunk shut and said, “Hello, Mama.”

Backlit, at the door to the garage, a woman. Her cool voice, “Why the Bentley?”

“Pardon?”

“Why the Bentley? Why not the Cadillac?”

Suzanne’s flustered grace. “I guess I was showing off to Emmett. Oh! You haven’t met!”

Suzanne hauled him forward to meet the grande dame, who maintained her place and her perfect posture. Mama was dressed in a camel-hair skirt and sweater set. She had great legs. He was taken with her shoes, which were long, narrow, tri-tone leather pumps, fawn, ivory, and black. She held her head high, her mouth in a small smile, thus eliminating jowls and laugh lines.

Mama put her manicured hand into his, the “how do you do” delivered in a leathery contralto that had something to do with Scotch whisky — in proportion. “We’re just back from Provence,” she told him and pressed the waves of her hair into place, “and still out of sorts.” She had a more cultured British accent even than Norfield’s. She took a step into the chilly shade and waited while her eyes adjusted before proceeding. “What is it you do, Mr. Jones?” She was examining the cars, running her finger over the canvas lid on the Alfa Romeo, then coming around the grill on the Bentley, yellowed with gravel dust. It would take a Geiger counter to measure the true value of her dissatisfaction, so unimpressed was she by the world she governed.

Emmett, feeling diminished, admitted that he was still a student. “I’m studying Asian history,” he added.

She raised her head. “Chinese?”

“Japan. Mostly. But yes, China. And Vietnam.”

Suzanne said, “Emmett was born there.”

“In China?” Mama spoke as if quoting someone else’s vulgarity. There were aspects of the world beyond her ken, where they belonged. This time, the head stayed low, examining the silver paint, slowly making her way around to the Bentley’s dimpled rear end.

“No,” he said. “I was born in Japan. Near Kobe.”

She heard him politely, mildly curious, perhaps remembering the Bomb. Then, “And what’s this?”

“I had a little scrape,” said Suzanne. “A bump. I was just going to confess to Dad.”

“Perhaps you should confess to me, dear.”

“Oh, it was nothing. I hit a curb, that’s all.”

Mama surprised Emmett by squatting lithely to give the Bentley’s fender a forensic exam. “What kind of curb?”

Mama stood. As he grew more accustomed to her features, he could see a certain warmth there, a candid irony. She said, “What have you got in the trunk?”

“Books.”

“Lift the latch.”

Suzanne opened the trunk.

Beautiful, manicured hands moved over the dun-coloured books, lifting a cover, “Jack London? What’s this?” She lifted Theodor Dreiser from the pile, Eine Amerikanische Tragödie. “German?” She returned it and picked up another. “Revolution Betrayed. What on earth? Literature and Revolution. Ah. The Communist Manifesto. This I know. What do you intend to do, Mr. Jones? Blow the place up?”

Suzanne said, “We’re keeping them for a friend.”

“Because?”

Suzanne looked to Emmett for clarification, then answered bravely, “Because they were too heavy for him to carry.”

Mama’s sterling irony. “On the run.”

Emmett took Marx out of Mama’s hands. “This was my mistake. I never should have asked Suzanne to bring them here. I’ll take them away.” He began to stack the books in his arms.

Mrs. McCallum was speaking to Suzanne as if he weren’t there. “Is this the suitor I’ve been hearing about?”

“No, it is not. The suitor you’ve been hearing about is a horse’s ass.”

“I am not speaking of Dirk Dupont. The other one. The new one.”

John Norfield. Mama put her weight back on her heels, a position that thrust her hips forward, like a gunslinger.

Suzanne realized that Emmett was leaving the stable. “Where are you going?” she asked.

He would walk to the road and hitchhike. “I’ll come back for the rest. The books will be gone by nightfall.”

“That’s ridiculous,” said Suzanne. She appealed to Mama. “We can store them here, can’t we?”

“We certainly cannot. For goodness’ sake, these books are illegal!”

“That’s only in Quebec, Mother.”

“I cannot have — paper, here,” waving, “in the garage,” pronounced gá-rahj. She was struggling; she did not like her fear to be evident. “We’ll get mice.”

Emmett stood out in the sun, looking into the fragrant stable, aware of Mama’s pale face, the narrow nose with its pink nostrils, Mama saying, “My husband is an important man.” He turned and headed for the road. Mama’s voice rose, strident, “Do you want to destroy everything your father and I have fought for?”

“Fought for?” Suzanne hissed. “You just sit on the phone with your broker!”

Then he was out at the road. A milk delivery truck, an old Ford, picked him up at the end of drive, as if they’d timed it on purpose. The truck’s cab was upholstered in spotless Jersey cowhide, unsettlingly supple and soft, a sacrifice made by a cow. “Like it?” asked the driver. “Did it myself.” The driver, a man of maybe seventy years, had no teeth; he had a habit of sucking his lips over his gums in a way that must have been pleasurable. The truck was hauling steel canisters filled with milk, everything sealed and spotless, the atmosphere milky. “Name’s Ed,” he said and reached across his sunken chest to offer Emmett his left hand while he held on to the wheel with his right.

Ed was cross-eyed. He took a gander at the books and stiffened, appraising Emmett for a moment, then driving several miles in silence.

Emmett expected Ed to kick him out. But then he heard a wobbling tenor, Ed rolling down his window, letting in the wind while he sang, “You will eat, by and by, in that glorious land above the sky. Work and pray, live on hay, you’ll get pie in the sky when you die.” That one verse, before he rolled up the window, driving on. “Yep,” he said. And a few minutes later, he added, “You a vet?” Emmett said that he was. “Non-profit enterprise,” Ed drawled, nodding sagely, “unless you’re in the steel business. Aircraft parts, coal, that kind of thing will make a whole lot of money in a war.”

They were downtown. “Just drop me off here,” Emmett told him. But Ed said, “Blood profit,” and insisted on taking him all the way to Leonard’s yellow brick building, where he reached around to shake Emmett’s hand again, saying, “They fed you a load of horse manure, gettin’ you to fight their goddamn war.”

Emmett got out with his armload of books. The sky had darkened, a meagre twilight, and the air had turned cold. He stood on the concrete steps and freed two fingers to pry open the heavy door to Leonard’s building, hurried up the stairs to Leonard’s suite, and threw all the books down in the hallway, careless of the noise he was making, then went back down to collect the several that had fallen.

When at last he entered the apartment, a speckled dusk filtered through the dirty window. It was abandoned. But for a short, square man in a hat, the pearl grey of his trench coat catching, enhancing the last light.

“Did I alarm you?” asked Mr. Farce. Then, “What have you got?”

“Who are you?”

“I’m looking for Leonard Fischer. You know where he is?”

“No.”

“Hmm. Yet, you said he was visiting his sick aunt.”

Mr. Farce was connected to the Polish carpenter somehow, a network of surveillance. Emmett felt the hateful confinement of being caught, having his words tossed back at him by such a dandy. “I don’t know where Leonard is.”

“He’s a good friend of yours. You might say he’s a fellow traveller.” Mr. Farce made the expression sound sexual.

“He’s not such a good friend.”

“Yet you have a key to his apartment.”

Emmett said, “A lot of people have a key to this place.”

“Who?”

“I don’t know their names. And I don’t know where Leonard is.”

“Why did you say that you do know, Emmett?”

Emmett looked more closely at his interrogator. In the fading light he confirmed that they were of the same age, or close to it. So power wasn’t inflicted on the powerless from above, or from an older generation; power was all around him, he was hemmed in.

Mr. Farce approached. Emmett could smell his cologne when he leaned across and switched on the lamp.

“Look.” Emmett made his voice sound tired. “I was doing the guy a favour. He told me he was hard up for cash, so would I sell some things for him. The only thing he had were books, so I tried for that.”

“Any luck?”

“Not yet.”

The man looked into Emmett’s eyes, seeing something there that Emmett couldn’t hide. “It must be hard,” he said.

“Who are you?” Emmett asked again.

“Oh, come on.” He shook his head in disgust. “Did Leonard Fischer defect? Is he working for the Russians?” When Emmett didn’t answer, he persisted. “How about John Norfield? Dawson Elliott, know him? Joseph Chambers. Fred Shaw.”

“I don’t know any of them. Except John Norfield.” Emmett was guilty by association. Maybe the books weren’t technically illegal, but this man could require that he go with him now for questioning.

Mr. Farce gave a weary sigh. “Norfield. Yeah. I know. That, I know.” He rubbed his jaw, the diamond glittering on his hand. “If you’re telling the truth, about selling Fischer’s books, you’d’ve taken them to your friend Norfield.”

“How do you know I didn’t?”

He smiled to himself in a condescending way. “Let me ask you something. Have you ever seen Norfield sell a book?”

Emmett hadn’t. He said nothing.

“Ever wonder where he gets his money?”

“He’s a poet.”

This caught Mr. Farce by surprise. He laughed. “Holy god.”

Emmett went to the door and opened it. He expected to be restrained, maybe even attacked, and he forced himself to move slowly, listening for a sudden move from Mr. Farce, walking out to the hallway, leaving the door open behind him. He walked down the stairs and outside, feeling the man on his back, resisting the impulse to run. He didn’t know why he’d been let go.

He got back to the McCallum place just at nightfall. He took a cab, and had the cabbie wait while he loaded the books into the trunk. As the cab drove past the house on the way back out to the road, he saw Suzanne’s mother watching from a window at the corner of the main floor of the house. He was certain they looked each other in the eye, though she was thirty feet away. She let the drapes fall back into place and turned toward the darkness of the house without waving.

<>

That was November 1946, only sixteen months after two atomic bombs fell out of a blue sky onto two cities in Japan. Emmett removed the incendiary literature from the McCallum estate, while in the far-off land of the Soviet Union, the best scientists were preparing for World War Three, building nuclear bombs and long-range nuclear rockets. Success was in the air in America too. The United States was making some difficult decisions as to whether they should ignite a small amount of thermonuclear fuel by a large fission explosion or contrive a small fission explosion to ignite a very large mass of thermonuclear fuel (what they affectionately called the “superbomb”).

Suzanne McCallum’s elegant mother let the drapes fall and turned from the window as Emmett’s taxi rolled past and out to the road, lurching at the end of the drive. She did not wait to see him clearly off the property and did not see the nondescript sedan pull out from under the golden maples, following the cab back to College Street, to Emmett’s attic room in the home of a snoopy widow.