II.

ON A FREEZING SUNDAY in New York some weeks later, he left the hotel in the East Thirties which for years had maintained an abiding home for him in the form of a hamper of two suits of different weights, two pairs of shoes, a raincoat, a dinner jacket and a small monthly storage bill inscribed, “Your pied-à-terre in New York”—and set out for Queens in his rented car. The car had the heady vinyl smell which nowadays came with so much that was brand-new; its seat belt yawped at him like a jailor until he locked himself in. He was home. On the seat beside him, wrapped by Fortnum’s with the nanny care that sent biscuits unbroken round the world, was an unwieldy package containing an assortment of their finest, centered around one modest gift to be made at the true and highest Meshed level of eternal friendship—his own great-grand-uncle the brigadier general’s silver collapsible traveling cup. All of this packed together in one very large pot of interesting design. “Can’t afford to insure that, I’m afraid, sir,” the tail-coated clerk said, admiring it. “That’s all right,” Wert said. “Neither can I.”

He’d ended up buying a seat for the package in the plane to Washington, where it rode belted in like a passenger and spoken to coyly by the stewardess, after she’d finally agreed to allow it there. “Your wife’s not on the plane, sir?” He’d shaken his head, staring moodily at his package. “For the wedding of our very best friend. Friends.” He patted it. “Sorry your wife’s ill, sir.” The stewardess was sympathetically older than average; the airlines were permitting that. “The baby,” Wert said. When she passed by again, she reached down and straightened his companion’s seat belt. “Austrian wine cooler,” he said. “Break like crazy. Can’t think why they wanted it; they’ve been living together for years.”

Though he’d never had need of the fantasy life, he’d rather enjoyed being cast into the expected social frame. He had a lot of random experience and information going to waste. No trouble for instance, to find a home for that plant; he’d taken it at once to a dead colleague’s widowed mother, who still lived near Blenheim Park, in the glass-roofed atrium her husband had built for them out of complete disregard for the climate and an equal regard for an ancestor who had been the King’s astronomer. She had converted the house to a conservatory, planted its ground to tree nurseries and now lived in a hut at the bottom of her topiary garden. Where, when she and he stood there by moonlight—in the midst of a grass-and-pebble chessboard on which the thirty-two tree-chessmen whose queen skirts and turreted hats she herself had clipped loomed like adversaries about to move—she’d sighed, “To think that I once collected Belleek!”

From her dead son, who’d sighed over that, too, Wert knew what that was. What did most people do with the odd knowledge and peculiar people they collected throughout life? They passed these on to their children, who often couldn’t care less but in time couldn’t help being immersed in the fabric, too. “What’s Belleek?” one said importantly to one’s girls—“Why, according to an old friend, it’s an Irish china of creamy texture but nasty puffy shape—exactly like the Irish temperament.” Or to the boys on occasion, slowly and mysteriously, “Why that’s a job for the King’s astronomer.”

For of course one gave them one’s fantasy, as well. He could recall his own father doing this, though in the South of those days the whites more often relegated this duty to the blacks. Until Wert was ten, the cooks and gardeners of the town, the servants and the service people, had been his juvenile literature, a communal resource shared by all white children of his rank. And the blacks of those days, with more held-in fantasies than even their own children could support, had been glad of the chance.

So if now in his middle age he began to feel like some weighed-down collector whose bric-a-brac was turning to junk—was it only middle age? Or a profession where he remained a cultural tailor who never sent in the Sunday suit, a diplomate of the world’s health, who must never prescribe? Not to reach even the brightest conclusion—that was his job. But privately, he had accumulated some.

Would he and Jenny have had children after all? Did he want them now? Other people’s children were like other people’s art to him; he had never wanted to possess. It was his belief that in the abstract, men never wanted children, and women rarely. When convention didn’t force it, a dissolution of other needs or a generalized yearning did, or that great progenitor, accident—until they saw the child. Then of course, they wanted to do it again, for the drama it added to the most meager lives. Viewed even dispassionately, to put into the world something absolutely new, yet dragging in its train all the old mysteries, was a marvelous act. He could only hope he wasn’t going to do something silly with women, or even with boys, though he had no taste for them. Doing either because of his sudden rosy passion—to transmit.

“Is it a rose?” he’d said to the widow, after she and a helper had lifted its clay pot out of the larger one, so that she could see its drainage—which had been as should be. The lorry he’d borrowed from the Hartsdale pub had a brewer’s name on it. Wert wore a sharp cap to match, and felt the winds of Oxfordshire tanning his cheeks. “You look lively,” she commented. “No. Not a rose or a daisy either, you clot. Nearer some form of mountain laurel, I fancy. I shall have to look in the book. If it’s there.” It wasn’t. “Can’t be a rose,” he said, coloring, remembering his grasp of it. “No thorns.”

Well, perhaps after all some hybrid; was his friend a grower?

“Used to be one,” Wert said, digging in a toe. “Once owned some of the largest opium fields in Iran. Made his millions from them. But at eighty he got rid of them. And has given a great deal of money for a hospital.”

“Ah so,” she said without a blink. “Well, it’s not a poppy. By the way, the hut won’t take that other pot. The fancy one.”

“That’s all right. I only have it on loan.”

She stopped to detach the withered wreath which still clung to the plant’s trunk. “Why, these were tree-orchids—how prettily they’ve dried! I shall save them for my granddaughter, who’s thirteen. At that age they press them, you know. Only us old parties dig.” She got up heavily, dangling the circlet from a wrist whose withered state it matched. “These came with? How extraordinary. So an old party sent you all this, eh? Pity.” She gazed up at him with the sibyl bluntness of all good gardeners. “Well, I’ll board your plant treasure for you.”

“No, it’s yours.”

She gave that English snuffle-click old Bakhtiary must have heard in the Cotswolds eighty years ago, and bent over the plant again. “Ah, you Arab beauty, I’ll take you in.” She fondled the thick stem. “Our village inn won’t, you know. Take in Arabs. Nor my sister’s hotel in Bournemouth, either. They do crowd one you know, abominably.” She crooned over the plant, greedily. “But I’ll take you. However did you get here?”

“I imagine she came by hand,” Wert said—and drove the whole way back to London in astonishment. Uneasily, he rang Cicely, the barrister. They had a fine evening—though not on the rug.

In Washington two days later, he was having lunch at the Monocle with Nosworthy, in town on the same business—a departmental conference on the serious drop in quality of the new recruits. “We’re getting only the squares,” Nosy said. “White or black. Oh, the ones with good accents and maybe a little money behind them—we always got some. And the smart-aleck ones who want to be gentlemen. That’s all right in a foreign service. As long as there’s also a steady enough stream of men at the top with—not only brains, but you know. A fervor to—you know.”

“Sure,” Wert said. “Could you possibly mean—men like us?”

“Ah, come on.” Nosy glanced from one tight little table to another. The place was a congressional haunt rather than one of theirs, which was why Wert had chosen it. “It’s not the Viet war that pisses off the young anymore, by the way. That generation’s gone.”

“Where?” Wert said.

“Come on. Into the nation, that’s where. And doing very well…I went up to Harvard the other day. Two staff men we’d very much like to have. Collaborated on a position paper for us once. Smart as hell, one of them. The other not bad. Not your academic jerks, either. Smooth. Know what that smart-ass had the nerve to say to me? ‘Mister, when I want to have a hand in my country’s diplomacy, I’ll join a multinational corporation—where I can have some real clout.’…And his sidekick agreed with him.”

“Nosy—” Wert said, “you and Gail having more trouble in Jamaica?”

The answer was yes. They wouldn’t be able to hold onto the house they’d put all their hearts into, unless they wanted to retire to a state of siege, political and vandal. His wife was desperate. “She says she’s too old to rethink the world.”

“But that’s what old age is, isn’t it? When you can’t?”

Nosy was holding a cigar to his ear, rolling it between thumb and forefinger to hear any stale crackle. He still got them from Cuba. “You thinking much, these days?”

Wert took the offered cigar and lit it. “Multinationals? Bigger deeds, bigger words. When you and I came in, corruption used to be quainter though. More personal.”

“Gimme back that cigar.”

Wert was touched by the American shyness that could still hit a nail on the head with a joke.

“It appears I’m about to be tempted, Uncle. Not sure with what. Want to bet on it?”

As he told his story, beginning with the Garrick and including a good part of that evening’s reflections—leaving out only the tree’s effect on him, and maybe not quite—a pale, incredulous smile grew on Nosy’s face, but he would say nothing, only shaking his head until Wert had finished.

“I’m fascinated with Manoucher,” he said then. He made Wert repeat all the young man’s utterances he could remember. “I might turn up in Iran; you never know.” As to Manoucher’s inviting the Garrick’s manageress to the Dorchester, he’d guessed it almost before Wert said, “It’s even possible he asked her there only for the company. They like female company, you know. Men of the harem nations. For itself.” Nosworthy had once been in Turkey for a long while, and Morocco, too, though never Iran. “They like to be centered in it, that is; they’re not like us. We get a mortal lot of it—but that’s different.”

All Nosworthy’s conversational reactions were governed by what he could or couldn’t tell either his wife or the nation—which by now might be identical. Though he was very good about the old man, very polite about the wedding. “They’re not satyriasts; never think that. The dynasts mean so much to them.” At times he could be a very smart man. “So you’re going to Queens the very day of the wedding; who suggested that?”

“The Bakhtiary women invited me for it. The wives.” When he’d called Manoucher’s home, three women had answered, apparently on three different extensions. A fourth phone, over which he’d heard younger giggles, was picked up afterward. “They’re going to hold a celebration throughout the day—I’m asked to early lunch. After the ceremony, which they’re going to see by hookup, they hope to talk to Iran.” Hesitated. “To the son I expect, Manoucher. And the—family. And maybe the girl.” He didn’t know the protocol. Or if there was one. Or whether they still honored it. “It’s all been arranged.”

“They must have rented satellite time.” Even Nosy was awed.

Wert’s conversation with the three women had been a kind of chorale, with each voice first identifying herself. “This is Soraya.” The young daughter-in-law, it must have been—Manoucher’s wife. “This is Fateh.” The old man’s second wife. And “This is Madame.” Meaning clearly the wife. “Only Fateh spoke in Farsi as well as English. Giggling all the way. She sounds a silly type.” The fourth extension’s giggles, Fateh’s young daughters, had quickly stopped. On command of Madame.

“What does Madame speak?”

“Swiss French; she lives in Vevey. A couple of times in English, though.” Stiltedly, but it might be only manner. Even the instrument, which vibrated when she spoke, seemed to know this was Madame.

“And the daughter-in-law? Manoucher’s new wife?”

“English, good as you or me.” In a dovelike, scarcely accented voice which Wert, brooding on its tone, could still hear. Resolute. Or some other old-fashioned word, or biblical one.

Nosy was delighted with Wert’s plans for the pot. But when Wert pressed him for an opinion on what the Bakhtiarys might be up to, he would give none. “Well, you’ll find out in a year, won’t you? Their plans for you, I mean. I agree they have some. As for why Manoucher’s in exile—” Nosy shrugged. “Maybe he’ll tell you that then, too. Maybe it’s even—something we ought to keep our eye on.” He rubbed his hands together. “All I know is—I wouldn’t mind having that young man in the Department.”

On the nature of what gift might be in store for Wert, Nosy refused to speculate, only shaking his head and saying, “I doubt if you’ll have to retire”—still with that faint smile. Insisting on paying the check, though, as if—Wert himself said—it was some kind of anniversary. Usually they each paid their own deductibles.

“It is an anniversary,” his friend said. Outside the Monocle, they’d gazed at the wide expanse between it and the building beyond, and the rising breastworks of the rest of Washington. “Since Manila,” Nosy said. Turning, he clapped Wert on the shoulder affectionately. Wert did the same, though he was usually undemonstrative with his own kind. Funny, when the European double kiss or male hug of warmer countries gave him no trouble, abroad.

“Well, let me know,” Nosworthy said, when the departmental car drew up for him. “Gail and I’ll be on tenterhooks.”

Wert wouldn’t see them for a year; they were going to Sri Lanka. Wert’s hand was shaken hard in parting, and his face was stared into, keenly. “I always loved Jenny,” Nosy said.

On the shuttle back to New York, Wert puzzled over that. Nosy had written him from Manila at Jenny’s death. By the time they met again, three years had gone by, leaving Jenny both too near and too far to be easily spoken of, even if Wert’s new arrangements—a woman here, a woman there—hadn’t been plain. Now, after all this time, there was something…valedictory in what Nosy had said, yet he’d done it almost gaily. When did people say a thing like that to you? There was a tone in it which Wert recognized but couldn’t seize.

In New York, the hotel manager welcomed him sadly. A new management and a renovation was in the works; after this year they could no longer harbor Wert’s hamper. In exchange, Wert would have television in the room when he stayed there, instead of in the clubby old lounge to which the hotel, quiet as a library upstairs, had always relegated it, and though his new room would be half the size of this one, he would have a modern closet with sliding doors, instead of that clumsy old armoire. “Gentlemen are going out,” Mr. Wemyss said. At eighty, and with a matching wife who still regretted their death notices couldn’t be in the defunct Herald Tribune—“the Times is simply not the same!”—he was certainly one of them.

“Gentlemen are always on the way out,” Wert said irritably. One felt the world was going to rack and ruin when one was of an age to feel it, irrespective of whether or not it was true. But he’d never before been classed as on that side of time’s colonnades.

Luckily, the woman whom he always called first when here still lived in the brilliantly chintzed Park Avenue apartment a divorce had granted her, along with her three grown daughters. During a round of plays and dinners, Wert made her talk of her girls; he wasn’t sure why. She was delighted to. Always tactful with his bachelor lack of interest, she never had. The three were all willful and all pretty. “Like me, once.” Little by little her anecdotes slipped farther out, across table and into their bed. “Oh, with kids, either you eat them alive or are eaten,” she’d say, staring at her napoleon as if it was a small coffin. Each night now, after love, she resumed her histoire.

She was a dear, kind woman; her house offered comfort artistically disciplined, and in sex her backbone arched with joyful intensity anyway he asked it to, her breasts pillowing him afterward. He tried to think of her, heroic among her warped nymphs, as all the lovelier for her distress. Blond hair streaming on her satin sheets, she looked it. “Oh, I’m so grateful I can talk to you about it, with most men you have to walk such a chalk line.” Though the girls were all away on a school trip, the three now advanced on him, steady on over their acnes and abortions. He’d intended to ask their mother to stow his hamper in one of her many opulent closets, but after that night decided not to. Inside him, the vote had gone against her. It wasn’t in this way he wanted to become part of the dynasts.

Besides, on these cold nights which were rocketing up the new year, all New York was a blue mosque. For sure, one would never meet a mullah there. The winds honking him across plazas had no underside from Russia; at their center he would never hear, like a tuning fork, the desert’s stealth. But down on the Lower East Side, where he went alone one night to the theater, a vendor roasted something on a cart from which came that same Middle Eastern smell which had pinched the Tabriz evening with charcoal—here sweet potatoes, a good try, but not the great hairy beets smoking red and orange, under an Elburz sunset which had hung in the west like a fine rug.

In Tabriz, the men shuffling along under that burnished light in baggy pants, suit jackets and bent fedoras had looked to him like tailors from this neighborhood. Before him in a bakery window, soft powdered cakes oozed the same poisonous yellow in front of which he used to see the Tabrizi schoolboys hungering in pairs, their fifth fingers linked. He would never bump into a donkey here if he hunkered till doomsday at the crossroads of memory. But in a dairy restaurant he sat for an hour watching a couple of old men with a week’s growth of beard, as they drank tea from a glass and played a game with counters, while their feet worked happily in and out of shoes worn down at the back. Borrowing the waiter’s pad and pencil stub, he wrote the note he owed Bakhtiary, thanking him for the tree, admiring his son, congratulating him on marriage, and wishing him well.

Outside again, he dropped into a stationery store to buy an envelope and stamp. The stage-blue had intensified. The upper bodies of people walking were circled in auras fumed with their breaths. Across the street a gutted building reared, each floor of the façade more open. At its top the stone frame pointed toward him its triangular pulpit—but it wasn’t a mosque. A letter box stood below. This city was its own city now, and the ruins were different. Staring up, he mailed the letter, to which he’d added a post-script. “Dear friend—don’t send me too much.”

That note must by now have reached Iran. To lie unnoticed maybe for weeks among the congratulations which in spite of all would be coming to Bakhtiary—and to the girl from Ardebil. Strange to think of today as her wedding day also. Would Bakhtiary be sitting apart, on his side of the house, complying with old-fashioned custom for the bride’s sake, since for her sake little enough could be done? While in another part, intoned over by female relatives who saw all their history in her, she sat in separate ceremony, in all her lacy, provincial pomp?

The only wedding Wert had ever seen there had been a peasant affair not far from that girl’s city, near the Caspian. Pious as the girl’s promises might be, it was more likely she was some wealthy man’s daughter, of the sort he’d glimpsed at their Embassy receptions in Paris—a rich Iranian milkmaid, modernized to the septum of her nose. In which case the male guests would be wearing cutaways, the youngest of the emancipated women might be bared and frizzled in the style the Department wives termed “Call me Babe,” and after the ceremony, couples would jounce up and down together in their peculiar fox-trots, which seemed to be not so much revived from the nineteen-twenties, as saved ever since. Yet none of this meant that the girl’s promises wouldn’t be kept.

Teheran was eight and a half hours ahead of New York. The ceremony was to be at nine-thirty in the evening. So here he was, driving off to Queens for a one o’clock lunch—and already chilly and touchy, after early breakfast at the United Nations with a member of the American delegation, unknown to Wert, who’d rung him up late and hectically the night before.

“Woodrow Smiley-Brown—” this tall, bleached man said when they met, “and yes, I was christened for the late, very late President, father’s friend. As father told me daily, ‘They’ll have to know their history, boy, to place you.’…” This over, he appeared less exhausted, keenly examining everyone who passed, and oddly excited by the UN restaurant—if one considered that he must see it every day of the week.

Pumping Wert, he was annoyed at him for knowing only as much as the next man on “the British temp-er-a-ment.” He was one of those who visualized all national temperament as rather like the wooden plank on which the waiter was offering him smoked salmon—as a thin slab of some indigenous substance on which a nation’s doings were daily deposited. But the term was useful; when it came up you knew either that the conversation would get nowhere, or that all human talk was in vain.

“No, I won’t have more salmon, thanks,” Wert said, “I’m going to a wedding in Teheran at one o’clock.”

The man was duly startled; Wert had meant him to be. Over here he made use of the most shamefully childish tactics, probably because he no longer felt sure of what men were like here, or women either. In his travel-twisted way, he knew too much. He’d grown away from those home standards which, if kept rigidly, whatever they were, made a person certain of himself for life.

“Your companion going with you?” Wert’s package, brought up from the parking lot, sat on a chair at the table’s third side. “If so, you’re both going to be late.”

Smiley had been brought up to a certain coyness, Wert decided. As the father had. He explained, lightly sketching Bakhtiary and his entourage.

“Thought they’d discouraged multiple wives. That they don’t do that anymore.”

“They do and they don’t.” He wasn’t going to explain Bakhtiary to this man. “Never multiple, though. Islam allows four, I believe.”

“So you’re going to lunch with three old ladies, to listen to their husband, the old guy—get married again. By international hookup.”

“Two wives. Third one’s the young daughter-in-law. And neither wife’s really old. Let’s see—” He’d been intending to do this arithmetic, out of a sense that there were already mysteries enough—and that he ought to prepare. “Madame the first wife was married when she was sixteen and he sixtyish; which would make her now about forty-six.” He’s amazed; Bakh always referred to her as “my traveling dowager.” “So was the second wife, Fateh. When he was about seventy-two. Eighteen years ago; that would make her—my word. Only thirty-four. The new bride’s the same age they were.”

“Got a daughter at Brearley who’s sixteen,” Smiley said gloomily. “You ever feel that these older countries have the right attitude toward—got any daughters, Wert?”

“No. Though I have friends who do.”

“Umph…This daughter-in-law—what age is she?”

“In a way, she’s the oldest. She’s already twenty-four. Of course, she went to the University of Teheran. But only just married—that’s still very late—for their girls. Or used to be.”

“It’s us,” Smiley said, still gloomy. “You may depend upon it; it’s us.”

“You know Iran?”

“No, I was a social scientist. Specializing in Africa. In the days when that was a small field. Or a big empty one. Southern Ghana—four years there. Then northern Nigefia, two more. Village structure—I wrote a book oh it.” He leaned forward. “What’s your ambition, Bill?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Aren’t you going to ask me?”

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

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

“Can’t you?”

“I’m trying. That’s why I’m here.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My wife died.”

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

“My wife never wore a hat.”

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

“Ah,” Wert said.

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

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

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

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

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

“Eee,” Wert said.

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

“And your sons?”

“Haven’t any.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Ah, man—you want a village.”

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

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

Wert recoiled. “Why?”

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

“I’ll find it.”

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

“Sorry.”

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

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

“You haven’t met them.”

Wert threw up his hands.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What, then?”

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

“Didn’t think.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not right away.”

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

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

He let Smiley help him to the car after all.

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

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

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

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

“Did he now. Whatever for?”

“Wish I knew. And he’ll only send me something else. For better or worse. As a valedictory bequest. I wish I knew what.” Wert’s neck felt cold; the dress muffler he wore was too thin. “The ladies know, I fancy. Over there, they usually know everything.”

“And never say a word?” Smiley sighed.

“Never used to.” Wert paused, hand on the car door. “Funny. I can almost feel—what it’s going to be. But not quite. Some bloody complication I’d be very wise to—forestall. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but I can’t name it. It’s even in my own day-to-day actions somewhere. Something quite simple maybe, that other people might even be able to see.” He thought of Nosy. “Are able. Knowing me.”

“Ma-an. Maybe you better go to a movie.”

They shook hands lengthily, grinning at each other.

“Maybe your Nancy and I’ll talk you over,” Smiley said. “If we see anything, let you know.”

Both laughed, and kept standing there.

“Going to snow,” Wert said, staring up.

“Yeah.” Smiley probed the gray sky carefully. “Going to snow.”

Watching him go, Wert thought he looked jauntier. Starting up the car, he slapped its dashboard as if it were the rump of a horse. Nancy would be answering the telephone within say—half an hour. At least he’d done a destiny job as neatly as a machine.

Going around the block to change directions, he found Smiley on the corner, just hailing a cab. The traffic light held them fast. “Have fun in your village,” Smiley said.