The Impermanent Revolution

by RONALD ARONSON

The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879-1921by Isaac Deutscher
The Prophet Unarmed: Trotsky 1921-1929by Isaac Deutscher
The Prophet Outcast: Trotsky 1929-1940by Isaac Deutscher

[from the March 14, 2005 issue]

Isaac Deutscher stands out among the early intellectual mentors of the New Left as the only one who expounded classical Marxism. On a mid-1960s "must read" authors list that included C. Wright Mills, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, Deutscher alone stressed class conflict, the progressive movement of history and proletarian revolution. For those of us who were anti-Stalinist Marxists, reading Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy was a rite of passage. It was simultaneously a sympathetic, critical and reflective biography of Trotsky and a full-blown history of the Russian Revolution. In his Trotsky trilogy and other books and articles on Stalin, the contemporary Soviet Union and China, the cold war, Marxism, ex- Communists and Jewish history, Deutscher offered a living Marxism that was both unashamed of its revolutionary commitment and able to grasp historic ironies and tragedies.
Many of us who read Trotsky in study groups trying to puzzle through the "what might have beens" in the Bolshevik Revolution and Communism became practiced at arguing every major turn of Soviet history as we struggled to discover what went wrong. Paradoxically, the tragic story of Trotsky's rise and fall gave us a profound sense of hope, even as Deutscher showed at every turn the historical logic behind Stalin's victory and Trotsky's defeat. After all, Deutscher argued passionately that the logic of history would also demand the fulfillment of socialism's vision of equality, democracy and workers' power in an advanced industrial society freed from class rule and the market. Trotsky embodied the "good" Communism, destroyed by Stalin, that became a revolutionary inspiration for many in the New Left.
It is impossible to read Deutscher's Trotsky biography today without being struck by how remote these hopes now seem. The Soviet Union is gone, and revolutionary projects aiming at human emancipation seem to have exhausted themselves. In a world reconfigured by Islamist terrorism and the "war on terror," dreams of social justice are no longer propelled by mass social movements of the secular left. So how does one read Deutscher, for whom being a Marxist historian and political mentor were one and the same?
Deutscher was born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Galicia, Poland, in 1907. A brilliant student of Torah and Talmud, he had already ceased to be a believer by the time of his bar mitzvah. He was soon publishing Polish and Yiddish poetry and translating poetry into Polish. At university in Krakow and then Warsaw, Deutscher studied literature, philosophy, history and economics, and became a Marxist. After joining the banned Polish Communist Party he soon became chief editor of its press. "For years," he wrote, "I was busy editing literary journals, writing political commentaries, illegal manifestoes, conducting as a soldier underground propaganda in Pilsudski's army, and all the time dodging the gendarmerie and the political police."
He traveled in 1931 to the Soviet Union, where he declined a position teaching socialist history and Marxist theory at Moscow University. Organizing an anti-Stalinist opposition upon his return to Poland, Deutscher was expelled from the party. In 1938 he wrote the Polish Trotskyists' statement urging their comrades not to initiate the Fourth International prematurely, which led to his break with organized Trotskyism. A journalist in London at the outbreak of World War II, he immersed himself in English in order to write for British publications, notably The Economist. His first book, Stalin: A Political Biography, appeared in 1949, and his Trotsky trilogy was published between 1954 and 1963. Irving Howe criticized its Marxism, while the British Trotskyist Tony Cliff accused him of "capitulation to Stalinism." Deutscher spoke at one of the first great anti-Vietnam War teach-ins, at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965. At the height of his powers and renown, Isaac Deutscher died suddenly at 60 in 1967.
Numerous English-language biographies of Trotsky have been published since the 1960s, most recently Cliff's four- volume work, which seeks to recapture Trotsky for the Trotskyists, and Ian Thatcher's more scholarly account, which aims to correct Deutscher's and others' biases by incorporating four decades of research. But none of these biographers rivals Deutscher as a storyteller. Alas, the new publisher of Deutscher's greatest achievement appears to have brought it out with some ambivalence, reprinting it without so much as an introduction to help the reader locate Deutscher's trilogy today. The photographs are omitted from all but the third volume, Deutscher's extensive, indispensable indexes have been replaced with a handful of name references, and the books are littered with dozens of typos. So we encounter the new version stripped down and unsituated, in a cheapened format that does little honor to publisher or author.
To read Deutscher's trilogy today is to undertake one of those several-month journeys that we begin with pleasure, and then continue joyfully and even obsessively until we reach its gripping end. Its protagonist, Lev Davidovich Bronstein, was born in southern Ukraine in 1879 to an illiterate but enterprising Jewish farmer and his more cultured and religious wife. Raised in a world of hard work and upward striving, the boy was sent to a cosmopolitan school in Odessa, where he lived with literary-minded cousins who belonged to that city's small and timid liberal intelligentsia. Eagerly absorbing their culture, the country cousin excelled in school, displaying the competitiveness and sense of superiority that would mark the man.
Sent in 1896 to Nikolayev to complete his secondary schooling and study mathematics at the university, Bronstein first encountered socialist ideas and soon became enamored of the fading Narodnik socialism that romanticized the peasantry and endorsed acts of terrorism by intellectuals. Joining old and young radicals in a discussion group meeting at an orchard near town, he met his first serious intellectual interlocutor and future wife, a young Marxist named Alexandra Sokolovskaya. Within a year, Russian students and workers were in rebellion and the 18-year-old had converted to Marxism, confidently assuming the leadership of the Southern Russian Workers' Union. The group of old Narodniks, Marxists, students and workers grew to more than 200 members and feverishly engaged in agitation in the port city until the czarist police crushed them. Imprisoned for the next two and a half years, Bronstein was then carted off to Siberia along with his bride.
The precocious revolutionary had also discovered the power of the written word. Prison and exile now became his university, and he began to shape himself into one of the great intellectuals of the twentieth century--reading the Bible and religious tracts, studying Marx and Lenin, and writing self-assured essays on Nietzsche, Zola, Ibsen, Ruskin and Gorky. Like Deutscher, Bronstein believed that "revolutionary socialism was the consummation, not the repudiation, of great cultural traditions" in which he made himself at home. Leaving his wife and two daughters behind in Siberia and traveling under the name of a jailer, "Trotsky" found his way to the exile colonies of London. There he joined Lenin, his wife, Krupskaya, and Martov in the leadership of the Social Democratic Party. Addressing audiences of fellow exiles, he discovered a new gift, as a master of the spoken word. Deutscher writes:
He appeared, as it were, with the drama in himself, with the sense of entering a conflict in which the forces and actors engaged were more than life-size, the battles Homeric, and the climaxes worthy of demi-gods. Elevated above the crowd and feeling a multitude of eyes centered on him, himself storming a multitude of hearts and minds below--he was in his element.
In unabashedly grand prose Deutscher captures the people, movements and events that resulted in the 1905 and 1917 revolutions. At their center was the Russian working class, "one of history's wonders":
Small in numbers, young, inexperienced, uneducated, it was rich in political passion, generosity, idealism, and rare heroic qualities. It had the gift of dreaming great dreams about the future and for dying a stoic death in battle. With its semi-illiterate thoughts it embraced the idea of the republic of the philosophers, not its Platonic version in which an oligarchy of pundits rules the herd, but the idea of a republic wealthy and wise enough to make of every citizen a philosopher and a worker. From the depth of its misery, the Russian working class set out to build that republic.
Twelve years after the rehearsal of 1905, in which Trotsky chaired the St. Petersburg Soviet, czarism collapsed. After a spring and summer of upheaval the workers and Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, were ready to seize power in what soon became known as the October Revolution. Trotsky served as the revolutionary government's first foreign minister and then, as the civil war began, he created and led the Red Army. After four years of battle the Bolsheviks vanquished their White Russian enemies, but the country lay in ruins, and, as Deutscher notes, another side of the working class had begun to assert itself, "side by side with the dreamer and the hero...the lazy, cursing, squalid slave, bearing the stigmata of his past." Mired in backwardness, the revolution's ostensible constituency sank into the passivity that made it possible, by Lenin's death in 1924, for the "batlike" Stalin, the Communist Party secretary, to slowly gain control. Despite Lenin's warnings to remove him, it was already too late by Lenin's death: The great revolutionaries of the Politburo--Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin--ultimately supported the unassuming Stalin over the brilliant and voluble Trotsky. (Remarkably enough, during the crucial months of struggle with Stalin, he drafted one of the major works of Marxist literary criticism, Literature and Revolution.) Although sidelined by Stalin, he continued to publish essays on every conceivable topic, from culture to science to Soviet development to foreign affairs. In 1928, however, the great revolutionary hero was sent into internal exile. A year later he was expelled from Russia and forced to wander the world.
In exile, Trotsky struggled to organize a Communist opposition to Stalin, to comment on world events such as the rise of fascism, to defend himself against Stalin's ever more bizarre accusations and to explain developments in the Soviet Union. As his name and stature grew in defeat he became a magnet for radicals, some serious, others dilettantes, notably Max Eastman, the editors of Partisan Review, Victor Serge, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo (with whom he famously had an affair). And Trotsky continued to write, under near impossible conditions, producing the memoir My Life, the great History of the Russian Revolution, prescient essays on the rise of fascism and the classic indictment of Stalin, The Revolution Betrayed. As ever, these writings displayed an immense range, self-confident sweep, appreciation of detail, descriptive flair and interpretive power; in the most pathetic and humiliating circumstances Trotsky continued to think and act as if he was shaping history. He reached deeply into himself again and again for the courage to lead, write and analyze, although he was constantly preoccupied with finding a place to live and protecting his family, which was not spared Stalin's wrath. Harassed and hunted down, his children were murdered by Soviet agents or died prematurely, while his daughters' spouses ended up in concentration camps and their children vanished.
This is a spellbinding tale, told by a great storyteller, and each reader will have a saddest moment. Mine is in 1935: In a cottage in a remote French village, Trotsky and his second wife, Sedova, hear two men pass by singing the Internationale. Although drawn to the song by a powerful compulsion, they have to stay hidden because these proud Communists might discover who they are and denounce them to the party, causing their death or deportation.
Still, Trotsky never gave up on Communism, refusing to side with bourgeois governments against the state led by Stalin, his sworn enemy, even as the purges targeted anyone suspected of Trotskyist sympathies. (One of the most interesting and curious documents of this period is Their Morals and Ours, an exchange about violence and political morality with John Dewey, who had taken it upon himself to investigate, and eventually reject, the accusations made against Trotsky at the Moscow trials of the late 1930s.) Trotsky's refusal to declare that the Soviet Union was no longer a workers' state ultimately drove away many of his intellectual fellow travelers, including Eastman and Serge.
Deutscher keeps the reader on tenterhooks as the story reaches its horrifying conclusion in 1940. Stalin had long since become absolute ruler, most Old Bolsheviks were dead, millions were in labor camps and primitive Russia had been brutally dragged into the modern world. Refusing "to let his existence become cramped by fear and misanthropy," the exiled onetime leader of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolshevik insurrection, the Soviet Union's first foreign minister and first commander of the Red Army, sits down at his desk in a Mexico City suburb to read an amateurish article by a shadowy character who, posing as his bumbling follower, had wormed his way into Trotsky's household. After reading one page, "a terrific blow came down upon his head" from an ice pick. "His skull smashed, his face gored, Trotsky jumped up, hurled at the murderer whatever object was at hand, books, inkpots, even the dictaphone, and then threw himself at him. It had all taken only three or four minutes."
The word "tragedy" comes to mind again and again in reading Deutscher's Trotsky biography, not only because Trotsky's death was part of the enormous human catastrophe that was Stalinism but also because he helped call up and contribute to the very force that destroyed him and his followers. And, as in classical tragedy, Trotsky's strengths are inseparable from his weaknesses. Our appreciation of the trilogy as literature thus entails a political and historical understanding of where the man, and the Bolshevik Revolution, went wrong.
Deutscher notes Trotsky's puzzling unwillingness to combat Stalin until it was too late, attributing it to a sense of superiority that kept Trotsky from taking the party secretary seriously as an antagonist. But there are deeper reasons for Stalin's victory over Trotsky. Much earlier, during the famous Bolshevik-Menshevik split of 1903, Trotsky had denounced Lenin's notion of a vanguard party as "substitutism" and had accused him of "trying to force the pace of history." Indeed, he only reconciled with Lenin and decided to join the Bolsheviks in July 1917, three months before the Revolution. During the crucial next few years Trotsky's high position derived from his élan for analysis, public persuasion and organization under crisis, Stalin's from his capacity to create a network of loyalists and install them in positions of privilege and power. The party man easily outmaneuvered the brilliant revolutionary.
Trotsky's reliance on his powerful mind and his relative disinterest in creating personal relationships and networks take us deeper into the heart of the matter, namely that Trotsky's Marxism was of little use in negotiating the new situation created by the Bolshevik Revolution. Stalin sought power; Trotsky did not. In the void of backward Russia in which the Bolsheviks ruled in the name of the workers but stood above all social classes, the "base" of workers so trusted by Trotsky mattered less than the "superstructure" of increasingly self-interested party officials appointed by Stalin. The reality that sealed Trotsky's and the Soviet Union's fate was not Marxist at all.
An effort to understand where the October Revolution went wrong leads us to the illusion that made it possible. Deutscher observes that Lenin and Trotsky fervently hoped that Bolshevik success in Russia would set off revolutions throughout Europe, and that they could not have acted to seize power without their "world- embracing hope to embrace a world-shaking deed." But what was the origin of this belief at the heart of Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution"? "History produced the great illusion and implanted it and cultivated it in the brains of the most soberly realistic leaders when she needed the motive power of illusion to further her own work." She? Needed? Her work? In a strange Hegelian twist Deutscher makes history with a capital "H" the active force, rather than Lenin or Trotsky or the Russian workers--as if these people were merely its vessels, as if History's hidden rationality could be discerned in Bolshevik irrationality.
Like that theoretical cornerstone of Bolshevism, Lenin's vanguard party, Trotsky's "permanent revolution" was an effort by revolutionaries to solve the deep contradiction between the dreamer and the slave--between the limits imposed by their Marxism, on the one hand, and their intoxicating grasp of the possibilities of seizing power, on the other. Although Russia was not remotely ripe for socialism, a determined group of revolutionaries sensed how vulnerable it was to a radical shift of power. They knew that no social class but the proletariat, led by them, was able to act decisively. But, as Deutscher also reminds us, Engels had warned that a leader coming to power before the time is "ripe for the domination of the class which he represents" is "irrevocably lost." The Bolshevik leaders accordingly pinned their hopes on socialist revolutions in one or more advanced countries, especially Germany. (As it turned out, Communism's abbreviated future lay, for the most part, in the least advanced countries of the colonial world.)
Making a proletarian revolution in Russia thus turned on clearheaded analysis of real possibilities--and wishful thinking. What, after all, were the grounds for thinking that the Russian Revolution would trigger a European revolution that would support the Soviet Union and transform the world? Hadn't French and German workers marched off to war proudly and spent four years killing one another at the behest of their rulers? Perhaps some of the survivors might be radicalized by the war, but Russia could hardly count on them. Deutscher leads us to, but does not draw, the obvious conclusion: The Bolshevik Revolution was a leap into the blue, a radical act of will. Its tragedy was not produced by "History" but by revolutionary zeal that flew in the face of sober Marxist analysis--that of Martov and the Mensheviks, for example. Recasting Marxism into the Bolshevism of 1917, Lenin and Trotsky abandoned Marxism's insistence on democracy and a high level of economic development and implicitly acknowledged this by dropping "Democratic" from their name and becoming the Communist Party. Martov, who refused to follow suit, was cast into Trotsky's "dustbin of history."
The leader of the revolution, creator of the army that defended it, soon came face to face with its result: the suffering, demoralization and even opposition of many of those workers who had been its backbone. The gifted but often abstract theorist now proposed a forced-labor system; the fiery workers' leader now demanded state control of trade unions. For the moment, both of these ideas were defeated. And then, in March 1921, with the civil war nearly won and the ruling party congress meeting in Petrograd, the radical sailors of nearby Kronstadt, once his greatest admirers, rose up against "Trotsky the hangman," calling for the Bolsheviks' overthrow and the fulfillment of the shelved promises of Soviet democracy. Commissar of War Trotsky ordered the murderous assault that, however necessary to protect Bolshevik power, effectively extinguished the revolution's dreams.
Writing a generation after these choices were made, Deutscher focused above all on the situation they created. To a point, his Marxism allowed him to produce forceful explanations of the revolution's fate--by 1921 the working class was exhausted, the cities depopulated and the economy destroyed by the civil war; rural Russia was backward and indeed "barbarous," and the new country found itself surrounded by hostile powers. But behind this litany of conditions in which the all-powerful Soviet state was constructed and Stalinism emerged, Deutscher discerned, once again, the logic of History: Russian modernization could be led only by a crude creature rising from its primitive depths, not by a sophisticated, cultured, Europeanized Jew.
Irving Howe argued thirty years ago that "Deutscher suffered from a modern disease: the infatuation with history." It is if anything even more obvious today that this was an occupational disease--Marxists usually focus on objective factors in such a way as to hide their own point of view, illusions and all. As if by some law of compensatory repression and displacement, the more Bolshevism came to depend on human will, the more fixated its analyses became on the "objective situation."
To be sure, such an approach can be coherent and persuasive, since almost everything can be explained by this logic: Stalin's role in the Communist Party, his ascent to power, his need to sideline first Trotsky, then Zinoviev and Kamenev, then Bukharin, then his decision to expel Trotsky and the opposition, to exile all of them, and so on, right up to the purges and murders. And it is this very objectivism that gave Trotsky's writings in exile such force, especially his powerful understanding of how Russian backwardness fostered Stalinism. Yet why did he proclaim to the end that the Soviet Union remained a workers' state and that only the leadership needed changing? Obviously this belief, and Deutscher's similar sense of the tragic necessity of Stalinism, directly fed each man's optimism about the future. Even as Deutscher explored, in more than 1,200 pages, what went wrong with the Soviet Union, he presented a considered sense of future Soviet possibilities based on the Bolshevik Revolution's and, more controversially, Stalin's accomplishments. Despite the brutality and human hecatombs, not only did a modern industrial society emerge but, Deutscher suggested, this was the only way it could have emerged in Russia. Building on its significant socialist accomplishments, including a nationalized and planned economy, Deutscher believed, the Russian working class in whose name the Communist Party ruled would eventually claim its rights, democratizing the Soviet Union and transforming it into a genuine socialist society.
Since Deutscher died in 1967, before the full scope of the post-Khrushchev sclerosis was evident, he did not live to see the Soviet suppression of "socialism with a human face" in Czechoslovakia or of Solidarity in Poland, let alone the end of the cold war, the fall of the Berlin wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself. In predicting that the post-Stalin Soviet Union would find its way to a more democratic form of socialism, Deutscher's sense of the dialectic of history was stunningly wrong.
Yet despite this bedrock optimism, Deutscher's Trotsky trilogy helps us grasp why in 1991 the people of the Soviet Union lacked the will and desire to create a democratic socialist alternative to Communism. The basso ostinato in Deutscher's trilogy is that the one-party state--the fundamental constitutional principle emerging from the Bolshevik Revolution, installed by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin--is a "contradiction in terms." Deutscher shows both the "objective" necessity and the nightmarish consequences of the Communist monopoly of power. He traces its logic in The Prophet Armed, and then in The Prophet Unarmed he returns often to two themes: why the triumphant Bolsheviks, Trotsky among them, "now thought themselves unable" to relinquish their monopoly of power, and how they began to fulfill Trotsky's dire 1903 prophecy: "The party organization [the caucus] at first substitutes itself for the party as a whole; then the Central Committee substitutes itself for the organization; and finally a single "dictator" substitutes himself for the Central Committee."
Deutscher concludes the trilogy with the hope, long shared by many on the left, that "a Marxism cleansed of barbarous accretions" would soon encourage "struggle against bureaucratic privilege, the inertia of Stalinism, and the dead-weight of monolithic dogma." But he failed to see that the "traditions of Marxism and of the October Revolution" had become inseparable from single-party rule. In the minds of its citizens, this had become the decisive--and detestable--feature of Soviet socialism. It has always been tempting, in the 1930s, in the 1960s and again today, to look for the original sin of the Bolshevik Revolution. But what if it was the revolution itself? Not its radicalism and not its use of violence but rather the vanguard party's determination to assume power over a backward society in the first place, and in the single-party state that followed?
Despite so much about it that seems to belong to the past--Trotsky's and Deutscher's belief in history, their faith in the revolutionary role of the working class, their Leninism--Deutscher's Trotsky biography is not yet ready to join Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War as a classic. Read it and see: It is too alive, too close to us, too much about our world. Trotsky and Deutscher's universe is essentially the same as ours, minus one decisive feature: their movement and its incarnation in the Soviet Union. The twenty-first-century world is still driven by the capitalist system's revolutionary dynamism; its main problem is the absence of any significant counterweight. While there is resistance to "globalization" and American hegemony today, it no longer comes principally from the socialist left but--violently, hellishly and uncomprehendingly--from radical Islamists and other fanatics fired by dreams of an imaginary past rather than visions of an egalitarian future.
What, then, do we make of Trotsky's hopes, Deutscher's hopes? It turns out that hope based on illusion is no more than a false hope, and has led, time and again, to disaster. But that is the easy lesson. The more difficult one is that sometimes it takes a lifetime, even generations, to dispel the power of illusion. Earlier generations of the left fell under its spell; gone today is our faith in history, gone today is the belief that radical acts of will can transform the world without degenerating into brutality. Perhaps the illusion that we have most recently abandoned is, as the late Nation writer Daniel Singer (himself a Deutscher protégé) said, the kind of thinking that misses "the connection between ends and means." To put it crudely, but in a way that indicts Trotsky and some of the wilder spirits of the New Left no less than Stalin, we have learned that force cannot create a humane society. It is a lesson that the neoconservative architects of the Iraq War and their liberal hawk fellow travelers have yet to absorb.

The Great Foreigner

by Niccolò Tucci

Issue of 1947-11-22Posted 2005-02-21

This week in the magazine and here online, Jim Holt writes about the intriguing friendship between Albert Einstein and the logician Kurt Gödel. In this piece from 1947, Niccolò Tucci describes an afternoon visit with Albert Einstein in Princeton, New Jersey.
There is such a thing as being a foreigner, but not in the sense implied by passports. Foreigners exist, to be sure, but they may be found only in places where it would be impossible to discover a single policeman or a single immigration official—in the field of the intellect. A man who achieves anything great in any province of the mind is, inevitably, a foreigner, and cannot admit others to his province. If you are one of his own people, you will, of course, find him, because you yourself are there, but if you are not, your knowledge of him will be mostly confined to the petty intelligence of the gossip columns. Now, we all know from experience what it means, in this sense, to be refused entry, even as a temporary visitor, into this or that foreigner’s domain. We meet a great man and cannot talk to him, because, alas, we happen not to be able to get interested in the thing in which he excels. Silly though it seems, this is humiliating, for it makes us aware of our limitations. Yet that feeling is soon forgotten. There are people today, however, whose foreignness can’t be forgotten, and these are the physicists, who have done things to us that keep us wondering, to say the least. They have lessened—in fact, almost destroyed—our hopes of a quiet and happy future. It is true that they have also increased our hopes of surviving discomfort and disease, but, oh, how far away that seems, and how near seems the possibility of extermination! That is why, when my mother-in-law, who flew over from Europe a couple of weeks ago, said that she wanted me to accompany her on a visit to the home of her friend Albert Einstein, in Princeton, I was very reluctant to go.
I had seen Einstein several times in the past eight or nine years, and on the last occasion—in 1942, I believe—I had been bold enough to invite him to come out of his inaccessible territory and into that of all the unscientific people, like myself. Would he, I asked, explain, in words rather than in mathematical symbols, what he and his colleagues actually meant by the fourth dimension? And he did, so simply and so clearly that I left his house with an uncontrollable feeling of pride. Here, I, the living negation of anything even slightly numerical, had been able to understand what Einstein had said—had really said, for he had said it not only in his conversation with me but years before in his theories. Obviously, he had explained to me merely what a child would be able to grasp, but it impressed me as much more because my schoolteachers and my father, all of them less great than Einstein, had never forgone a chance to make me feel a perfect fool (and to tell me, lest I should have missed drawing the inference), even when they spoke to me about fractions or equations of the first degree. I consequently realized that Einstein belonged to the extremely rare type of foreigner who can come out of his seclusion and meet aliens on alien ground. Yet, much as I cherished the recollection of that pleasant experience, I did not think it altogether advisable to try my luck again. “This time,” I said to my mother-in-law, who is called Bice in the family, “he may easily make me feel like a fool. Besides, in 1942 Einstein’s achievements did not keep me awake at night, as they do now. If I saw him now, I would not be moved by the slightest scientific curiosity about his work. I would much rather ask him what he thinks of the responsibility of modern scientists, and so forth. It might be quite unfair to him and unpleasant for me.”
Well, mothers-in-law must have secret ways of persuasion, because a few days later I gave in, not only on seeing Einstein but also on taking along Bimba, my six-year-old daughter. “All right,” I said resignedly, “but you, Bimba, will be sorry for this. You don’t know who Einstein is. He has all the numbers; they belong to him. He will ask you how old you are.” And I must say here that Bimba, even more than myself, is the mathematical scandal of our family. She tries to count her six years on her fingers, but she forgets how high she has counted and must try again. Upon a guarantee from me that Einstein would not interview her on that delicate subject, we made peace and departed. On our way out of the apartment, we met my eight-year-old son, Vieri, who was playing ball on the sidewalk.
“Vieri,” I said, “want to come and see Einstein?”
“Einstein the great mathematician?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Naw,” he said. “I have enough arithmetic in school.”
On the train that morning, my mother-in-law and I talked a great deal about Maja, Einstein’s younger sister, one of two links Bice has with higher mathematics. But I must say that she is a weak link, because Maja is the opposite of all abstraction. She looks exactly like her brother (one would almost say that she, too, needs a haircut), but she is a Tuscan peasant, like the people who work in the fields near her small estate of Colonnata, just outside Florence. Even her frame of mind is, in spite of her cosmopolitan culture, Tuscan. Whatever in conversation does not make sense to her in plain, human terms she will quickly dismiss with a witty remark. But before becoming a Tuscan peasant, Maja was a brilliant young German student of philosophy in Paris. She interrupted her studies to take a job as governess in charge of young Bice, whose mother had just died, leaving her the only female of the family, surrounded by a number of older brothers and her father. All this happened forty years ago. Soon after her arrival in the family, Maja became Bice’s second mother and dearest friend. Even after Maja resumed her studies and got married, they remained very close, and did not lose touch with each other until shortly before the outbreak of the recent war, when Maja left Italy to join her brother in Princeton. And today Bice, accompanied by a somewhat impatient son-in-law and by a pestiferous young angel of a granddaughter, was rushing to Princeton for the great reunion.
On the way, we also talked pleasantly about America (like all Europeans who come here for the first time, Bice was eager to know about everything in the first week), we discussed the fate of the world and the wisdom of those who run it, we quarrelled over theology (Bice is fond of theologies, with a marked preference for her own, the Roman Catholic), and finally I noticed that she wasn’t listening to me any more. She frowned, she shook her head, then she smiled and nodded, staring in front of her, but not at me and not at Bimba. I knew that she was making an inventory of her sentimental luggage. All the news of the troubled years, from the death of her eldest son in the war to the latest item of family gossip, from the bombings of towns to the latest method of making a pound of sugar last a year, were being called to mind, so that everything would surely be ready for Maja. I made a sign to Bimba not to interrupt her grandmother, and Bimba sat there and stared, somewhat frightened by this woman who was looking so intently at her own life.
When we arrived in Princeton, it was quite misty, and there was a threat of rain in the Indian summer air. At the station, we took a cab and soon learned that the driver, a young student, was the son of a friend of ours in Florence. He was trying to make enough money driving a cab to finance a trip to South America. Our conversation with him was so interesting that only the sight of open country around us made us realize that we had driven all the way out of town. We drove back and stopped in front of a house on Mercer Street. I had forgotten the exact address, but this house looked like the right one. In her eagerness, Bice ran ahead of me toward the door, but the reunion could not take place, because, as we discovered when we rang the bell, it was the wrong house. Luckily for us, the cab was still there, so we drove along a little, and finally, after ringing the bells of two other families that refused, not without sorrow, to be the Einsteins, we decided upon one more house, which happened to be the right one. Miss Dukas, Einstein’s secretary, greeted us at the door; then came Margot, his delicate and silent stepdaughter, who looks so much like a Flemish painting; and Chico, the dog, who tried to snatch Bimba’s red ribbons from her pigtails.
“Bimba,” I said, “don’t get the dog excited. Remember how he ate your doll five years ago. Now, if you are not very quiet today, I am going to ask you in front of Einstein how much makes three and two—understand?”
She nodded, and whispered, “Four?”
We were asked to wait for a moment in the small anteroom that leads to the dining room. Maja was upstairs; she was being helped out of bed and into the chair in which she spends most of her day. She is recovering from a long illness, which has delayed her return to Italy, so it was only natural that this reunion should be delayed until she was ready and comfortable. And yet this addition of even a few minutes to years of separation created an effect of absurdity. One always imagines that the crossing of the last span of a trip bridging years will be something impulsive: when all the real impediments, such as continents, oceans, and passports, have been overcome, friends should run into each other’s arms as fast as they can. Still, it is never quite that way. We become so used to living at a distance that we slowly begin to live with it, too; we lean on it, we share it, in equal parts, with our faraway friends, and when it’s gone and we are again there, corporeally present, we feel lost, as if a faithful servant had abandoned us.
To fill in those extra minutes, we began to look at the furniture in the anteroom and dining room, and I noticed again what I had noticed five years ago in those same rooms: everything suggested the house of a faculty member of a German university. I could not trace this impression to any particular object. The large dining-room table in the center, with the white tablecloth on it, was not particularly German, nor was the furniture in the anteroom, but there was the same quiet atmosphere of culture that had impressed me so deeply in the houses of university professors, in Freiburg, Leipzig, and Berlin, to which my parents had taken me when I was a boy and spent my summers travelling over Europe. It is something that remains suspended in the air almost as stubbornly as the smell of tobacco; one might say that the furniture had been seasoned with serious conversation. Curiously, it is an atmosphere that can never be found in the apartment of a diplomat, even if he is the son of a professor and has inherited his father’s furniture.
We were finally called upstairs by Margot, who then disappeared into her study. Bice’s impatience was such that, not finding Maja in the first room we entered, she said disappointedly, “Not here,” and ran toward a closed door to open it, like a child playing hide-and-go-seek. This search lasted only a matter of seconds, because the house isn’t large enough for a long search. But by the time we reached Maja, Bice seemed almost to have lost hope that she would ever get there. Maja was standing near her chair waiting, quiet, dignified, almost ironical, under a cloud of white hair. She never shows any emotion, never speaks louder than a whisper, and never more than a few appropriate words—just like the Tuscan peasants, with the difference that when they whisper, they might as well be addressing a crowd across a five-acre field.
The “How well you look!” and “How unchanged you are!” were soon over, and then the Great Foreigner arrived, pipe in hand and smiling gently. He complimented Bice on looking just the same as ever, and received the same compliment with grace, then inquired about Michele, Bice’s eldest brother and her second link with higher mathematics. Uncle Michele is a gentle little man who sits in Bern, Switzerland, and looks out into the world, leaning on a white beard that descends from almost under his blue eyes to the end of his necktie. Every night for twenty years, in the company of a friend, he has looked into “The Divine Comedy,” taking time off to look into his soul with a fierce, puritanical spirit tempered by a great deal of natural goodness; he has also looked into the field of economics, trying to find mathematical formulae to solve the crisis of the world; and for a long time, in the company of Einstein, he looked into the mysteries of higher mathematics. We had just finished hearing all about Uncle Michele’s health and his many grandchildren when Bice seemed suddenly to recall an extremely urgent matter—as if, indeed, it were the very reason she had flown all the way over here from Europe. “Herr Professor,” she asked, in German (the whole conversation, in fact, was in German), “this I really meant to ask you for a long time—why hasn’t Michele made some important discovery in mathematics?”
“Aber, Frau Bice,” said Einstein, laughing, “this is a very good sign. Michele is a humanist, a universal spirit, too interested in too many things to become a monomaniac. Only a monomaniac gets what we commonly refer to as results.” And he giggled happily to himself.
Then we spoke about dreams. Bice told us two symbolic dreams she had had years ago; I told the dream that the grandfather of a friend of mine had had the day before he died; Einstein told an absurd dream of his. He seemed the only one to find the conversation interesting, which it was not. Bice was now sleepy (the emotion had been too great for her); Maja sat silent and ate her lunch, which a nurse had brought in on a tray; and I nodded to Einstein’s words, searching impatiently for a way out of dreams to the subject of the responsibility of modern scientists. But the atmosphere somehow weighed on me. The mist was getting thicker, and it had begun to rain, with that quick, fingertip drumming on the leaves, on the roof, on some pail outside, that makes you go to sleep. It was dark in the room now. The only points of light were the white of the bed, the white of the nurse’s uniform, and the white of Maja’s hair and of Einstein’s head against the window—and his laughing eyes, his voice, and the joy that sprang from him. “Damn the responsibility of modern scientists on a damp day like this,” I thought. It made me both envious and angry to see this man in front of me who laughed so heartily at the most trivial things, who listened with such concentration to our nonsense, who was so full of life while I could see no reason even for breathing in that damp, misty air. “Why is he so young,” I asked myself, “and what makes him laugh so? Is he making fun of us, or what is this?” Then I began to understand. He had just come from the other room; he was stretching his mind; he was “abroad.” All these words were only formally addressed to us; actually they were references to some demonstration he must have received, in the heart of his own secret country, that something was exactly as he had suspected it would be. Yes, it could be nothing but this: he had done fruitful work that morning. I saw it now because I recognized myself in him—not as a scientist, alas, but as a child of seven, at which age it was my hobby to make locomotives with tin cans and old shaving brushes (the smokestack with the smoke). The situation was the same. When the joy of toymaking became too great, I had to interrupt my work and run to the living room, where the grownups were boring themselves to death. And I laughed at their words without bothering to inquire what they meant; I found them interesting, new, exciting; I was praised for being such good company while in actuality I was still playing with my locomotive—I was deciding in my mind what colors I would paint it, what I would use for wheels and lanterns—and it was good to know that no one shared my secret. “You and your toys,” I thought, looking at Einstein with the envy that an ailing old man has for a young athlete.
Lunch was announced, and we went downstairs, leaving Maja alone. The smell of food consoled me for my humiliation. I began to eat. Einstein asked Bice for her impression of America, and she expressed her disappointment at the bad manners of children in this country. This led to a family argument, in which Einstein was asked to act as arbiter. Bice claimed that American children (she meant mine, of course) have no respect for the authority of their parents, or for that of such people as park attendants. To prove her point, she said that, on the day before, Vieri and his friend Herbert had laughed in the face of a park attendant when he told them not to play ball. Yes, they had obeyed him in the end, but not without making strange noises in his honor. (She didn’t know the name for this Bronx ceremony.) I conceded that this was frightful, but I reminded her that a park attendant in Europe was a sort of Commander-in-Chief of Leaves and Flowers and First Admiral of Public Fountains and of the paper boats in them. Even a smile addressed to him without proper authorization was considered daring. “When I was a boy in Italy, we never questioned anyone’s authority,” I said, “and thus we passed, with the most perfect manners, from the hands of our nurses to those of our tyrants.”
As moderator, Einstein asked me how I had managed to lose authority over my children.
“I didn’t have to work much,” I replied. “It was rather simple. I just told them, ‘Look at the kind of world in which we live. See what we, the grownups, are able to invent, from passports to radioactive clouds.’“
Bice contended that nothing is gained by embittering the lives of children with remarks of that nature, but Einstein was in full agreement with me when I answered that less than nothing is gained—in other words, that much is lost—by lulling them into the illusion that all is as it should be in the world. “You, as a scientist,” I said to Einstein, “know that the world is round and not divided naturally by cow fences into holy, restricted fatherlands. When you were young, there was still a semblance of good in governments and institutions, but today—see where we are today.”
He became very serious, as if he were seeing where we are today, but suddenly a smile lit up in his eyes, and it quickly spread all over his face and beyond it. He laughed happily, then said, “Let me tell you what happened to me years ago, before the other war, when there were no passports. The only two countries that required them were Russia and Rumania. Now, I was in Hungary and had to go to Rumania. I didn’t know where and how to apply for a passport, but I was told that it wasn’t necessary. There was a man who had a passport of his own, and he was kind enough to let anybody use it to cross the border. I accepted the offer, but when they asked me at the frontier what my name was, I said, ‘Wait a moment,’ took out the passport from my pocket, and had a great deal of trouble trying to find out who I was. Now, to go back to your point, I agree with you that those who exercise any kind of authority, be it the authority of a father or that of a government, have a definite obligation to show that they deserve respect, but the trouble with grownups in our day is that they have lost the habit of disobedience, and they should quickly learn it again, especially when it comes to the infringement of their individual rights.” He laughed again, this time like a bad boy, then, shaking his head, said, “These grownups. Isn’t it terrible how readily they will obey?”
“Take the loyalty test for federal employees, against which so few have protested,” I said.
“That is a case in point,” he answered. “People are asked to be loyal to their jobs. But who wouldn’t be loyal to his job? Too many people, indeed. Also in Italy and in Germany they used to test people’s loyalty to their jobs, and they found a far greater loyalty to jobs than to democracy. But now tell me another thing. What do you give to your children in the way of good news about the world?”
“Plenty,” I said. “For example, I tell them about Socrates, who was killed by the greatest democracy on earth for standing at the corner drugstore and asking questions that made the politicians feel uncomfortable.”
“That’s not a cheerful story, either,” he said, “but if they were able to absorb some of the spirit of the Greeks, that would serve them a great deal later on in life. The more I read the Greeks, the more I realize that nothing like them has ever appeared in the world since.”
“You read the Greeks?” I said.
“But of course,” he replied, slightly surprised at my amazement. And so I heard, partly from him and partly from Miss Dukas, that he reads the Greeks to Maja every night for an hour or so, even if he has had a very tiring day. Empedocles, Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Thucydides receive the tribute of the most advanced and abstract modern science every night, in the calm voice of this affectionate brother who keeps his sister company.
“You know,” I said, “that is great news. Young Americans, who have an idea of the pure scientist worthy of the comics, should be told that Einstein reads the Greeks. All those who relish the idiotic and dangerous myth of the scientist as a kind of Superman, free from all bonds of responsibility, should know this and draw their conclusions from it. Many people in our day go back to the Greeks out of sheer despair. So you too, Herr Professor, have gone back to the Greeks.”
He seemed a little hurt. “But I have never gone away from them,” he said. “How can an educated person stay away from the Greeks? I have always been far more interested in them than in science.”
Lunch was over, and Einstein announced that he was going to go upstairs for his nap. Bice was assigned, for hers, a couch under a red-nosed portrait of Schopenhauer in the library-and-music room. The sun was shining again, so Bimba was told that she could go out to the garden to play, and I went for a walk around the town.
When, after an hour or so, I came back to the house, I found Bimba still in the garden. I was quite disappointed to hear that I had missed an extraordinary event. Just after I had left and just as Einstein started to go upstairs, Bimba had asked him to play the violin for her. He had not touched his instrument for almost a year, but he took it out and played Bimba a few bars from a Mozart minuet.
I saw Einstein on the porch, waving to me. I joined him there and sat down next to him while he stretched his legs on a deck chair and leaned back, one hand behind his head, the other holding his pipe in mid-air. I had a volume of the German translation of Plato by Preisendanz in my briefcase and asked his permission to read aloud a passage from “Gorgias.” He listened patiently and was very amused by Socrates’ wit. When I was through, he said, “Beautiful. But your friend Plato”—and he extended his pipe in such a way that it became Plato—”is too much of an aristocrat for my taste.”
“But you would agree,” I said, “that all the qualities that make for a democratic attitude are noble qualities?”
“I would never deny that,” he said. “Only a noble soul can attain true independence of judgment and exercise respect for other people’s rights, while any so-called nobleman prefers to conceal his vulgarity behind such cheap shields as an illustrious name and a coat of arms. But, you see, in Plato’s time and even later, in Jefferson’s time, it was still possible to reconcile democracy with a moral and intellectual aristocracy, while today democracy is based on a different principle—namely, that the other fellow is no better than I am. You will admit that this attitude doesn’t altogether facilitate emulation.”
There was a silence, and he interrupted it, almost talking to himself. “I lived for a while in Italy,” he said, “and I think that the Italians are among the most humane people in the world. When I want to find an example of a naturally noble creature, I must think of the Italian peasants, the artisans, the very simple people, while the higher you go in Italian society . . .” and as he lifted his pipe a little, it became a contemptible specimen of a class of Italians he does not admire.
A small airplane was appearing and disappearing between treetops, and gargling noisily right into our conversation.
“In the past,” said Einstein, “when man travelled by horse, he was never alone, never away from the measure of man, because”—he laughed—”well, the horse, you might say, is a human being; it belongs to man. And you could never take a horse apart, see how it works, then put it together again, while you can do this with automobiles, trains, airplanes, bicycles. Modern man is besieged by mechanics. And even more ominous than this invasion of our lives is the rise of a class of people born of the machine, so to speak—people to whom certain powers must be delegated without the moral screening of a democratic process. I mean the technicians. You can’t elect them, you can’t control them from below; their work is not of the type that may be improved by public criticism.”
“Yes,” I said, “and they are born Fascists. What can you do against them?”
“Only one thing,” he said. “Try to prevent them from becoming a closed society, as they have become in Russia.”
“This is why,” I said, “now that we have lost the company of the horse, we may get something out of the company of men such as the Greeks were.”
“It may be an antidote to conformism,” he said.
“Don’t you think that American youth is becoming more and more conformist?” I asked.
“Modern conformism,” he said, “is alarming everywhere, and naturally here it is growing worse every day, but, you see, American conformism has always existed to some extent, because American society, being based on the community itself and not on the authority of a strong central state, needs the coöperation of every individual to function well. Therefore, the individual has always considered it his duty to act as a kind of spiritual policeman for himself and his neighbor. The lack of tolerance is also connected with this, but much more with the fact that American communities were religious in their origin, and religion is by its very nature intolerant. This will also help you understand another seemingly strange contradiction. For example, you will find a far greater amount of tolerance in England than over here, where to be ‘different’ is almost a disgrace, for everyone, starting with schoolboys and up to the inhabitants of small towns. But you will find far more democracy over here than in England. That, also, is a fact.”
“Tell me, Herr Professor,” I said. “This has nothing to do with what we were discussing, but what are the chances that a chain reaction may destroy the planet?”
He looked at me with sincere sympathy, took his pipe slowly out of his mouth, stretched out his arm in my direction, and explained why his pipe (now the planet) was not likely to be blown to bits by a chain reaction. And I was so pleased by his answer that I didn’t bother to understand the reasons.
“Tell me,” I now asked, “why is it that most scientists are so cynical with regard to the issues of war and peace today? I know many physicists who worked on nuclear reactions, and I am struck by their complete indifference to what goes on outside their field. Some of them are as conspicuous for their silence as they are for their scientific achievements.”
“So much more credit for those who talk,” said he. “But, believe me, my friend, it’s not only the scientists who are cynical. Everyone is. Some people sit in heated offices and talk for years and write reports and draw their livelihood from the fact that there exist displaced persons who cannot afford to wait. Wouldn’t you call this cynicism? I know that you were going to ask me about the responsibility of the scientists. Well, it is exactly the same as that of any other man. If you think that they are more responsible because in the course of their research they found things that are dangerous, such as the atomic bomb, then also Newton is responsible, because he discovered the law of gravitation. Or the philologists who contributed to the development of languages should be considered responsible for Hitler’s speeches. And for his actions. If scientists were to refrain from investigation for fear of what bad people might do with the results, then all of us might as well refrain from living altogether.”
“In other words,” I said, “it would amount to a form of censorship on all our actions and thoughts.”
“A rather useless censorship,” he said, “for you can trust man to find other channels of evil.” Then he laughed heartily and added, “You may underestimate man’s ability to do evil.”
It was time to go. I ran upstairs to say goodbye to Maja and call Bice. “We heard you laugh a good deal,” said Maja. “You must have had a good time downstairs.”
“Indeed,” I said. “And it was a great honor to have Professor Einstein spend such a long time chatting with me.”
“Macchè onore d’Egitto,” said Maja, which means, in colloquial Italian “Honor, hell.”
Einstein went slowly back into his study. I caught a glimpse of his face; he was miles away from everybody, back in his foreign land.
As Bice, Bimba, and I were walking to the station, Bimba began to cry because she had lost the hat of a paper doll Miss Dukas had given her. She wanted to run back to look for it, but there was no time for that. To console her, Bice said, “Think, Bimba, when you grow up, you will be able to say that Einstein played the violin for you.”
“Oh, come,” said Bimba, “it isn’t true.”
“Why?” I asked. “Didn’t he play for you?”
“Call that play?” she said, making a sour face. “He had to use a stick to play it.”

Cold

By DEBORAH E. LIPSTADT

In late December I received a call from the White House Office of Presidential Personnel asking if I would be part of a small American delegation representing the president and the nation at the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. The dates fell smack at the beginning of the semester. I am loath to miss classes. Nonetheless, I decided that this merited the absence, and my dean agreed.

The delegation, which was being led by Vice President Dick Cheney, included Elie Wiesel; U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos and his wife, Annette, both Holocaust survivors; Fred Schwartz, who had spearheaded the rebuilding of a synagogue in the town of Auschwitz; Feliks Bruks, a Polish American who had been imprisoned by the Nazis in three concentration camps; and me. When I asked the White House official why I had been included, she explained that it was because of my work, especially my legal travails, exposing Holocaust deniers.

So that was how I found myself in the distinguished-visitors lounge at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland on Tuesday, January 25. We boarded a Gulfstream jet that seemed like it might have seated 40 but was configured for 10 passengers and six crew members. From the outside it looked like a miniature Air Force One, with the words United States of America emblazoned on the side. (Cheney was leaving later that night on Air Force Two, which was on the tarmac nearby.) I was able to answer my e-mail and to blog from the plane.

When we landed in Kraków in a blinding snowstorm, a convoy of police cars, limos, SUV's, and vans moved forward across the tarmac to greet us. The American ambassador to Poland, Victor Ashe, emerged from a car and thanked us for coming. Our luggage was unloaded and placed on a truck that preceded us to the hotel. By the time I entered my room, the luggage was waiting for me. It was all very heady and quite unlike my life as a professor.

But the Sybaritic pleasures were severely tempered by the reason we were there. While I sat in the "control room" -- a hotel suite that had been turned into an office -- dealing with my e-mail, behind me State Department officials vigorously debated the most efficient way to get us to Auschwitz-Birkenau the next day for the ceremony. With the expected crowds and motorcades, the officials were unsure whether it was better to send us in the vice president's entourage or in our own van. After listening for a while, I turned around and observed that there was something surrealistic about discussing how to get to the death camp, the largest "cemetery" in the world, punctually. We laughed uncomfortably.
The next day we sat for three long hours in the falling snow listening to orations and participating in the commemoration. After a while the speeches, many by heads of state, began to morph one into another. What could the statesmen say, surrounded by camp survivors, in the shadow, literally, of the gas chambers? I was reminded of Adorno's pronouncement that "writing poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." It seemed to me that on a day such as this, prose fared little better, except for the words of those who had actually experienced the camps.

I tuned out the speakers and began to reflect on those survivors' writings, which were very much with me because I had just finished teaching a course on memoirs of the Holocaust. In Still Alive, Ruth Kluger describes watching an SS guard preening on the other side of the barbed wire with a walking stick that had a loaf of bread stuck to the end. He tormented the starving prisoners by dragging the bread in the mud. Watching the bread destroyed in the dirt hit Kluger "like a blow in the diaphragm because it was such a crudely sarcastic expression of undifferentiated hatred."

Primo Levi describes a similar experience in Survival in Auschwitz, when, during his first days at the camp, driven by thirst, he saw a large icicle hanging outside his window. He reached out and grabbed it only to have a "large heavy guard prowling outside" brutally snatch it away. "Warum?" Levi asked. The guard replied: "Hier ist kein warum." Here there is no why.

Sitting there in my four layers of clothing, heavy socks, special boots, earmuffs, and hat, and nursing a cup of hot coffee, which our minders had kindly provided us, I was thrust back to the final days of the camp, when the Germans, unwilling to let 60,000 surviving Jews fall into the hands of the Red Army, forced them to march through the snow toward Germany, where they were put in concentration camps.

In Speak You Also, Paul Steinberg recalled that as the march began he knew that "one thing is certain: In the days to come, many will die just when their wildest dreams are about to come true. And that will be the cruelest blow of all." And Steinberg was correct. So many people died that the trek entered history as a "death march."

In the final chapter of his memoir, Levi describes in detail the situation at Auschwitz during the days before the arrival of the Red Army. Levi, left behind in Auschwitz's so-called hospital, saw the camp decompose. "No more water, or electricity, broken windows and doors slamming in the wind. ... Ragged, decrepit, skeletonlike patients ... dragged themselves everywhere on the frozen soil, like an invasion of worms. They had ransacked all the empty huts in search of food and wood. ... No longer in control of their own bowels, they had fouled everywhere, polluting the precious snow, the only source of water remaining in the camp."

Levi attributed his survival during those difficult last days to the friendship and support of a small group of men who were in the hospital with him. Their only goal, he told Philip Roth years later, was to save "the lives of our sick comrades." On the night of the 26th of January one of them died. Levi and his friends were too cold and exhausted to bury him. There was nothing to do but go back to sleep and wait for the next day. "The Russians arrived while Charles and I were carrying Sómogyi a little distance outside. He was very light. We overturned the stretcher on the gray snow. Charles took off his beret. I regretted not having a beret."

Sixty years later, as darkness fell over Auschwitz, I turned to one of the members of our delegation and said: "It's really cold. I regret not having worn another layer of clothing." Suddenly Levi's words came cascading back on me. I was embarrassed. And then without explaining why, I stood up in silent tribute not just to Sómogyi, but to the countless nameless others who had died there or those, such as Elie Wiesel's father, who died soon after the death march. I also stood for people such as Levi, who survived but bore the terrible wounds of the place for the rest of their lives.

Despite the sharp wind, I took off my hat. After all, I had one.

Deborah E. Lipstadt is a professor of modern Jewish and Holocaust studies at Emory University. She is the author of Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory (Free Press, 1993) and the just-published History on Trial: My Day in Court With David Irving (Ecco).

The ocean, the bird, and the scholar

By Helen Vendler

"Poetry is the scholar's art."

Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

When it became useful in educational circles in the United States to group various university disciplines under the name "The Humanities," it seems to have been tacitly decided that philosophy and history would be cast as the core of this grouping, and that other forms of learning--the study of languages, literatures, religion, and the arts--would be relegated to subordinate positions. Philosophy, conceived of as embodying truth, and history, conceived of as a factual record of the past, were proposed as the principal embodiments of Western culture, and given pride of place in general education programs.

in a reliable factual record, not to speak of faith in a reliable philosophical synthesis, has undergone considerable erosion. Historical and philosophical assertions issue, it seems, from particular vantage points, and are no less contestable than the assertions of other disciplines. The day of limiting cultural education to Western culture alone is over. There are losses here, of course--losses in depth of learning, losses in coherence--but these very changes have thrown open the question of how the humanities should now be conceived, and how the study of the humanities should, in this moment, be encouraged.
I want to propose that the humanities should take, as their central objects of study, not the texts of historians or philosophers, but the products of aesthetic endeavor: architecture, art, dance, music, literature, theater, and so on. After all, it is by their arts that cultures are principally remembered. For every person who has read a Platonic dialogue, there are probably ten who have seen a Greek marble in a museum, or if not a Greek marble, at least a Roman copy, or if not a Roman copy, at least a photograph. Around the arts there exist, in orbit, the commentaries on art produced by scholars: musicology and music criticism, art history and art criticism, literary and linguistic studies. At the periphery we might set the other humanistic disciplines--philosophy, history, the study of religion. The arts would justify a broad philosophical interest in ontology, phenomenology, and ethics; they would bring in their train a richer history than one which, in its treatment of mass phenomena, can lose sight of individual human uniqueness--the quality most prized in artists, and most salient, and most valued, in the arts.

What would be the advantage of centering humanistic study on the arts? The arts present the whole uncensored human person--in emotional, physical, and intellectual being, and in single and collective form--as no other branch of human accomplishment does. In the arts we see both the nature of human predicaments--in Job, in Lear, in Isabel Archer--and the evolution of representation over long spans of time (as the taste for the Gothic replaces the taste for the Romanesque, as the composition of opera replaces the composition of plainchant). The arts bring into play historical and philosophical questions without implying the prevalence of a single system or of universal solutions. Artworks embody the individuality that fades into insignificance in the massive canvas of history and is suppressed in philosophy by the desire for impersonal assertion. The arts are true to the way we are and were, to the way we actually live and have lived--as singular persons swept by drives and affections, not as collective entities or sociological paradigms. The case histories developed within the arts are in part idiosyncratic, but in part applicable by analogy to a class larger than the individual entities they depict. Hamlet is a very specific figure--a Danish prince who has been to school in Germany--but when Prufrock says, "I am not Prince Hamlet," he is in a way testifying to the fact that Hamlet means something to every one who knows about the play.

If the arts are so satisfactory an embodiment of human experience, why do we need studies commenting on them? Why not merely take our young people to museums, to concerts, to libraries? There is certainly no substitute for hearing Mozart, reading Dickinson, or looking at the boxes of Joseph Cornell. Why should we support a brokering of the arts; why not rely on their direct impact? The simplest answer is that reminders of art's presence are constantly necessary. As art goes in and out of fashion, some scholar is always necessarily reviving Melville, or editing Monteverdi, or recommending Jane Austen. Critics and scholars are evangelists, plucking the public by the sleeve, saying "Look at this," or "Listen to this," or "See how this works." It may seem hard to believe, but there was a time when almost no one valued Gothic art, or, to come closer to our own time, Moby-Dick and Billy Budd.

A second reason to encourage scholarly studies of the arts is that such studies establish in human beings a sense of cultural patrimony. We in the United States are the heirs of several cultural patrimonies: a world patrimony (of which we are becoming increasingly conscious); a Western patrimony (from which we derive our institutions, civic and aesthetic); and a specifically American patrimony (which, though great and influential, has, bafflingly, yet to be established securely in our schools). In Europe, although the specifically national patrimony was likely to be urged as preeminent--Italian pupils studied Dante, French pupils studied Racine--most nations felt obliged to give their students an idea of the Western inheritance extending beyond native production. As time passed, colonized nations, although instructed in the culture of the colonizer, found great energy in creating a national literature and culture of their own with and against the colonial model (as we can see, for instance, in the example of nineteenth-- and twentieth--century Ireland). For a long time, American schooling paid homage, culturally speaking, to Europe and to England; but increasingly we began to cast off European and English influence in arts and letters, without, unfortunately, filling the consequent cultural gap in the schools with our own worthy creations in art and literature. Our students leave high school knowing almost nothing about American art, music, architecture, and sculpture, and having only a superficial acquaintance with a few American authors.

We will ultimately want to teach, with justifiable pride, our national patrimony in arts and letters--by which, if by anything, we will be remembered--and we hope, of course, to foster young readers and writers, artists and museum--goers, composers and music enthusiasts. But these patriotic and cultural aims alone are not enough to justify putting the arts and the studies of the arts at the center of our humanistic and educational enterprise. What, then, might lead us to recommend the arts and their commentaries as the center of the humanities? Art, said Wallace Stevens, helps us to live our lives. I'm not sure we are greatly helped to live our lives by history (since whether or not we remember it we seem doomed to repeat it), or by philosophy (the consolations of philosophy have never been very widely received). Stevens's assertion is a large one, and we have a right to ask how he would defend it. How do the arts, and the scholarly studies attendant on them, help us to live our lives?
Stevens was a democratic author, and expected his experience, and his reflections on it, to apply widely. For him, as for any other artist, "to live our lives" means to live in the body as well as in the mind, on the sensual earth as well as in the celestial clouds. The arts exist to relocate us in the body by means of the work of the mind in aesthetic creation; they situate us on the earth, paradoxically, by means of a mental paradigm of experience embodied, with symbolic concision, in a physical medium. It distressed Stevens that most of the human beings he saw walked about blankly, scarcely seeing the earth on which they lived, filtering it out from their pragmatic urban consciousness. Even when he was only in his twenties, Stevens was perplexed by the narrowness of the way in which people inhabit the earth:

I thought, on the train, how utterly we have forsaken the Earth, in the sense of excluding it from our thoughts. There are but few who consider its physical hugeness, its rough enormity. It is still a disparate monstrosity, full of solitudes & barrens & wilds. It still dwarfs & terrifies & crushes. The rivers still roar, the mountains still crash, the winds still shatter. Man is an affair of cities. His gardens & orchards & fields are mere scrapings. Somehow, however, he has managed to shut out the face of the giant from his windows. But the giant is there, nevertheless.[Souvenirs and Prophecies, ed. Holly Stevens (New York: Knopf, 1977), note of April 18, 1904, p. 134]The arts and their attendant disciplines restore human awareness by releasing it into the ambience of the felt world, giving a habitation to the tongue in newly coined language, to the eyes and ears in remarkable recreations of the physical world, to the animal body in the kinesthetic flex and resistance of the artistic medium. Without an alert sense of such things, one is only half alive. Stevens reflected on this function of the arts--and on the results of its absence--in three poems that I will take up as proof--texts for what follows. Although Stevens speaks in particular about poetry, he extends the concept to poesis--the Greek term for making, widely applicable to all creative effort.

Like geography and history, the arts confer a patina on the natural world. A vacant stretch of grass becomes humanly important when one reads the sign "Gettysburg." Over the grass hangs an extended canopy of meaning--struggle, corpses, tears, glory--shadowed by a canopy of American words and works, from the Gettysburg Address to the Shaw Memorial. The vacant plain of the sea becomes human when it is populated by the ghosts of Ahab and Moby--Dick. An unremarkable town becomes "Winesburg, Ohio"; a rustic bridge becomes "the rude bridge that arched the flood" where Minutemen fired "the shot heard round the world." One after the other, cultural images suspend themselves, invisibly, in the American air, as--when we extend our glance--the Elgin marbles, wherever they may be housed, hover over the Parthenon, once their home; as Michelangelo's Adam has become, to the Western eye, the Adam of Genesis. The patina of culture has been laid down over centuries, so that in an English field one can find a Roman coin, in an Asian excavation an Emperor's stone army, in our Western desert the signs of the mound--builders. Over Stevens's giant earth, with its tumultuous motions, there floats every myth, every text, every picture, every system, that creators--artistic, religious, philosophical--have conferred upon it. The Delphic oracle hovers there next to Sappho, Luther's theses hang next to the Grunewald altar, China's Cold Mountain neighbors Sinai, the B--minor Mass shares space with Rabelais.
If there did not exist, floating over us, all the symbolic representations that art and music, religion, philosophy, and history, have invented, and all the interpretations and explanations of them that scholarly effort has produced, what sort of people would we be? We would, says Stevens, be sleepwalkers, going about like automata, unconscious of the very life we were living: this is the import of Stevens's 1943 poem "Somnambulisma." The poem rests on three images, of which the first is the incessantly variable sea, the vulgar reservoir from which the vulgate--the common discourse of language and art alike--is drawn. The second image is that of a mortal bird, whose motions resemble those of the water but who is ultimately washed away by the ocean. The subsequent generations of the bird, too, are always washed away. The third image is that of a scholar, without whom ocean and bird alike would be incomplete:

Somnambulisma

On an old shore, the vulgar ocean rollsNoiselessly, noiselessly, resembling a thin bird,That thinks of settling, yet never settles, on a nest.
The wings keep spreading and yet are never wings.The claws keep scratching on the shale, the shallow shale,The sounding shallow, until by water washed away.

The generations of the bird are allBy water washed away. They follow after.They follow, follow, follow, in water washed away.

Without this bird that never settles, withoutIts generations that follow in their universe,The ocean, falling and falling on the hollow shore,
Would be a geography of the dead: not of that landTo which they may have gone, but of the place in whichThey lived, in which they lacked a pervasive being,

In which no scholar, separately dwelling,Poured forth the fine fins, the gawky beaks, the personalia,Which, as a man feeling everything, were his.Collected Poetry and Prose (New York: The Library of America) Without the bird and its generations, the ocean, says the poet, would be a geography of the dead-- not in the sense of their having gone to some other world, but in the sense of their being persons who were emotionally and intellectually dead while alive, who lacked "a pervasive being." To lack a pervasive being is to fail to live fully. A pervasive being is one that extends through the brain, the body, the senses, and the will, a being that spreads to every moment, so that one not only feels what Keats called "the poetry of earth" but responds to it with creative motions of one's own.

Unlike Keats's nightingale, Stevens's bird does not sing; its chief functions are to generate generations of birds, to attempt to sprout wings, and to try to leave behind some painstakingly scratched record of its presence. The water restlessly moves, sometimes noiselessly, sometimes in "sounding shallow[s]"; the bird never settles. The bird tries to generate wings, but never quite succeeds; it tries to inscribe itself on the shale, but its scratchings are washed away. The ocean is falling and falling, the mortal generations are following and following. Time obliterates birds and inscriptions alike.

Imagine being psychically dead during the very life you have lived. That, says Stevens, would be the fate of the generations were it not for the scholar. Stevens does not locate his scholar in the ocean or on the shale, the haunts of the bird; the scholar, says the poet, dwells separately. But he dwells in immense fertility: things pour forth from him. He makes up for the wings that are never wings, for the impotent claws; he generates fine fins, the essence of the ocean's fish; he creates gawky beaks, opening in fledglings waiting to be fed so that they may rise into their element, the air; and he produces new garments for the earth, called not "regalia" (suitable for a monarchy) but "personalia," suitable for the members of a democracy. How is the scholar capable of such profusion? He is fertile both because he is a man who "feels everything," and because every thing that he feels reifies itself in a creation. He gives form and definition both to the physical world (as its scientific observer) and to the inchoate aesthetic world (as the quickened responder to the bird's incomplete natural song). He is analogous to the God of Genesis; as he observes and feels finniness, he says, "Let there be fine fins," and fine fins appear.

Why does Stevens name this indispensable figure a "scholar"? (Elsewhere he calls him a "rabbi"--each is a word connoting learning.) What does learning have to do with creation? Why are study and learning indispensable in reifying and systematizing the world of phenomena and their aesthetic representations? Just as the soldier is poor without the poet's lines (as Stevens says elsewhere)1 , so the poet is poor without the scholar's cultural memory, his taxonomies and his histories. Our systems of thought--legal, philosophical, scientific, religious--have all been devised by "scholars" without whose aid widespread complex thinking could not take place and be debated, intricate texts and scores could not be accurately established and interpreted. The restless emotions of aesthetic desire, the wing--wish and inscription--yearning of the bird, perish without the arranging and creative powers of intellectual endeavor. The arts and the studies of the arts are for Stevens a symbiotic pair, each dependent on the other. Nobody is born understanding string quartets or reading Latin or creating poems; without the scholar and his libraries, there would be no perpetuation and transmission of culture. The mutual support of art and learning, the mutual delight each ideally takes in each, can be taken as a paradigm of how the humanities might be integrally conceived and educationally conveyed as inextricably linked to the arts.

"Somnambulisma" is the illustration of Stevens's adage that "Poetry is the scholar's art." What is necessary, asks "Somnambulisma," for creative effort? Emotion, desire, generative energy, and learned invention--these, replies the poem, are indispensable in the artist. But there is another way of thinking about art, focusing less on the creator of art than on those of us who make up art's audience. What do we gain in being the audience for the arts and their attendant disciplines? Let us, says Stevens, imagine ourselves deprived of all the products of aesthetic and humanistic effort, living in a world with no music, no art, no architecture, no books, no films, no choreography, no theater, no histories, no songs, no prayers, no images floating above the earth to keep it from being a geography of the dead. Stevens creates the desolation of that deprivation in a poem--the second of my three texts--called "Large Red Man Reading." The poem is like a painting by Matisse, showing us an earthly giant the color of the sun, reading aloud from great sky--sized tabulae which, as the day declines, darken from blue to purple. The poem also summons up the people of the giant's audience: they are ghosts, no longer alive, who now inhabit, unhappily (having expected more from the afterlife) the remote "wilderness of stars." What does the giant describe to the ghosts as he reads from his blue tabulae? Nothing extraordinary--merely the normal furniture of life, the common and the beautiful, the banal, the ugly, and even the painful. But to the ghosts these are things achingly familiar from life and yet disregarded within it. Now they are achingly lost, things they never sufficiently prized when alive, but which they miss devastatingly in the vacancy of space among the foreign stars:

Large Red Man Reading

There were ghosts that returned to earth to hear his phrases,As he sat there reading, aloud, the great blue tabulae.They were those from the wilderness of stars that had expected more.

There were those that returned to hear him read from the poem of life,Of the pans above the stove, the pots on the table, the tulips among them.They were those that would have wept to step barefoot into reality,
They would have wept and been happy, have shivered in the frostAnd cried out to feel it again, have run fingers over leavesAnd against the most coiled thorn, have seized on what was ugly
And laughed, as he sat there reading, from out of the purple tabulae,The outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law:Poesis, poesis, the literal characters, the vatic lines,
Which in those ears and in those thin, those spended hearts,Took on color, took on shape and the size of things as they areAnd spoke the feeling for them, which was what they had lacked. The ghosts, while they were alive, had lacked feeling, because they had not registered in their memory "the outlines of being and its expressings, the syllables of its law." It is a triple assertion that Stevens makes here: that being possesses not only outlines (as all bodies do) and expressings (in all languages) but also a law, which is stricter than mere "expressings." Expressings by themselves cannot exemplify the law of being: only poesis--the creator's act of replicating in symbolic form the structures of life--pervades being sufficiently to intuit and embody its law. Poesis not only reproduces the content of life (its daily phenomena) but finds a manner (inspired, vatic) for that content, and in the means of its medium--here, the literal characters of its language--embodies the structural laws that shape being to our understanding.

Stevens's anecdote--of--audience in "Large Red Man Reading" suggests how ardently we would want to come back, as ghosts, in order to recognize and relish the parts of life we had insufficiently noticed and hardly valued when alive. But we cannot--according to the poem--accomplish this by ourselves: it is only when the earthly giant of vital being begins to read, using poetic and prophetic syllables to express the reality, and the law, of being, that the experiences of life can be reconstituted and made available as beauty and solace, to help us live our lives.

How could our life be different if we reconstituted the humanities around the arts and the studies of the arts? Past civilizations are recalled in part, of course, for their philosophy and their history, but for most of us it is the arts of the past that preserve Egypt and Greece and Rome, India and Africa and Japan. The names of the artists may be lost, the arts themselves in fragments, the scrolls incomplete, the manuscripts partial--but Anubis and the Buddha and The Canterbury Tales still populate our imaginative world. They come trailing their interpretations, which follow them and are like water washed away. Scholarly and critical interpretations may not outlast the generation to which they are relevant; as intellectual concepts flourish and wither, so interpretations are proposed and discarded. But we would not achieve our own grasp on Vermeer or Horace, generation after generation, without the scholars' outpourings.

If we are prepared to recognize the centrality of artists and their interpreters to every past culture, we might begin to reflect on what our own American culture has produced that will be held dear centuries from now. Which are the paintings, the buildings, the novels, the musical compositions, the poems, through which we will be remembered? What set of representations of life will float above the American soil, rendering each part of it as memorable as Marin's Maine or Langston Hughes's Harlem, as Cather's Nebraska or Lincoln's Gettysburg? How will the outlines and the expressings and the syllables of American being glow above our vast geography? How will our citizens be made aware of their cultural inheritance; how will they become proud of their patrimony? How will they pass it on to their children as their own generation is by water washed away? How will their children become capable of "feeling everything," of gaining "a pervasive being," capable of helping the bird to spread its wings and the fish to grow their fine fins and the scholar to pour forth his personalia?

To link, by language, feeling to phenomena has always been the poet's aim. "Poetry," said Wordsworth in his 1798 Preface, "is the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all science."2 Our culture cannot afford to neglect the thirst of human beings for the representations of life offered by the arts, the hunger of human beings for commentary on those arts as they appear on the cultural stage. The training in subtlety of response (which used to be accomplished in large part by religion and the arts) cannot be responsibly left to commercial movies and television. Within education, scientific training, which necessarily brackets emotion, needs to be complemented by the direct mediation--through the arts and their interpretations--of feeling, vicarious experience, and interpersonal imagination. Art can often be trusted--once it is unobtrusively but ubiquitously present--to make its own impact felt. A set of Rembrandt self--portraits in a shopping mall, a group of still lifes in a subway, sonatas played in the lunch--room, spirituals sung chorally from kindergarten on--all such things, appearing entirely without commentary, can be offered in the community and the schools as a natural part of living. Students can be gently led, by teachers and books, from passive reception to active reflection. The arts are too profound and far--reaching to be left out of our children's patrimony: the arts have a right, within our schools, to be as serious an object of study as molecular biology or mathematics. Like other complex products of the mind, they ask for reiterated exposure, sympathetic exposition, and sustained attention.

The arts have the advantage, once presented, of making people curious not only about aesthetic matters, but also about history, philosophy, and other cultures. How is it that pre--Columbian statues look so different from Roman ones? Why do some painters concentrate on portraits, others on landscapes? Why did great ages of drama arise in England and Spain and then collapse? Who first found a place for jazz in classical music, and why? Why do some writers become national heroes, and others not? Who evaluates art, and how? Are we to believe what a piece of art says? Why does Picasso represent a full face and a profile at the same time? How small can art be and still be art? Why have we needed to invent so many subsets within each art--within literature, the epic, drama, lyric, novel, dialogue, essay; within music everything from the solo partita to the chorales of Bach? Why do cultures use different musical instruments and scales? Who has the right to be an artist? How does one claim that right? The questions are endless, and the answers provocative; and both questions and answers require, and indeed generate, sensuous responsiveness, a trained eye, fine discrimination, and a hunger for learning, all qualities we would like to see in ourselves and in our children.

Best of all, the arts are enjoyable. The "grand elementary principle of pleasure" (as Wordsworth called it), might be invoked more urgently than it now is to make the humanities, both past and present, mean something relevant to Americans. Once the appetite for an art has been awakened by pleasure, the nursery rhyme and the cartoon lead by degrees to Stevens and Eakins. A curriculum relying on the ocean, the bird, and the scholar, on the red man and his blue tabulae, would produce a love of the arts and humanities that we have not yet succeeded in generating in the population at large. When reality is freshly seen, through the artists and their commentators, something happens to the felt essence of life. As Stevens wrote in the third of my texts, "Angel Surrounded by Paysans," the angel of reality then briefly appears at our door, saying:

. . . I am the necessary angel of earth,Since, in my sight, you see the earth again,
Cleared of its stiff and stubborn, man--locked set,And, in my hearing, you hear its tragic drone
Rise liquidly in liquid lingerings,Like watery words awash; like meanings said
By repetitions of half meanings. Am I not,Myself, only half of a figure of a sort, A figure half seen, or seen for a moment, a manOf the mind, an apparition apparelled in Apparels of such lightest look that a turnOf my shoulder and quickly, too quickly, I am gone?["Angel Surrounded by Paysans"]

That art--angel of the earth, renewing our sense of life and of ourselves, is only half meaning, because we provide the other half. Among us are the scholars who interpret those half--meanings into full ones, apparelling us anew in their personalia. In the apparels of his messenger, Stevens is recalling Wordsworth's great ode:

There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,The earth, and every common sightTo me did seemApparelled in celestial light,The glory and the freshness of a dream.

The secular angel refreshing our sense of the world, apparelled in Wordsworthian light, stays only for a moment, our moment of attention. But that moment of mental acutiy recalls us to being, the body, and the emotions, which are, peculiarly, so easy for us to put to one side as we engage in purely intellectual or physical work. Just as art is only half itself without us--its audience, its analysts, its scholars--so we are only half ourselves without it. When, in this country, we become fully ourselves, we will have balanced our great accomplishments in progressive abstraction--in mathematics and the natural sciences--with an equally great absorption in art, and in the disciplines ancillary to art. The arts, though not progressive, aim to be eternal, and sometimes are. And why should the United States not have as much eternity as any other nation? As Marianne Moore said of excellence, "It has never been confined to one locality."3

Notes:1. Epilogue, "Notes toward a Supreme Fiction."2. Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802)3. "England," the Complete Poems (New York: Macmillan and Viking, 1967)
© Helen Vendler 2004

THE ROADS OF HOME

by JOHN UPDIKE

In his rented beige Nissan, in a soft but steady November rain, David Kern exited from the Pennsylvania Turnpike at a new toll booth and was shot into an alien, majestic swirl of overpass and underpass. For some alarming seconds, he had no idea where he was; the little village of Morgan’s Forge—an inn, a church, a feed store—which should have been on his left, had vanished behind a garish stretch of national franchises and retail outlets. The southern half of the county, a woodsy stretch of rural backwardness when, soon after the Second World War, his family, at his mother’s instigation, had bought back the family farm, was now a haven for Philadelphians, who were snapping up the old stone farmhouses for weekend retreats. There were even, he had been told, daily commuters—more than an hour each way, but for them it was somehow worth it. For his part, fifty years ago, Kern couldn’t get out of the region fast enough.

He felt lost. Then a rusted, bullet-pierced road sign in the shape of a keystone, naming Route 14, oriented him, and he pressed on the accelerator with a young man’s verve. He knew this road: the gradually rising straightaway, with Morgan’s dam down below on the right; the steep downhill plunge, heralded by a sign advising trucks to shift to a low gear, toward the creek that curled around the roofless shell of the one-room schoolhouse his mother had attended as a child; and then the sharp right turn, slowing you more than the car pressing behind you ever expected, onto the stony dirt lane, long since macadamized, that led to what had been, for a time, his home.

He drove between the twin housing developments that had once been the Gengrich dairy farm and old Amos Schrack’s orchard, and from the crest saw what had been his family’s land. The meadow, low land once drained by stone-lined ditches that had been dug by his grandfather and great-grandfather, was no longer mowed; instead it was planted in rows of evergreens and birches for sale to landscapers. Beside it, quite buried in sumac and wild raspberry canes, lay the grassy road his mother used to walk, all by herself until joined by the Gengrich children, on her way to the one-room schoolhouse. There had been a towering tulip poplar beside the meadow which had survived into Kern’s middle age, as had his mother. She would tell him how, in warm weather, she would pause in her quiet walk beneath the tree’s big heart-shaped leaves, grateful for the shade and for the birdsong, subdued by the heat, in the branches.
His vivid image of her as a little girl—her hair braided and pinned so tight by her mother that her scalp hurt, walking in her checked dress and matching ribbons down this lonely road between the fields—had been her creation, as she conjured up for him those days of paradisiacal country loneliness, of trusting animals and hazy silence. She had wanted to infect him, another only child, with her primal girlhood happiness, so that when he inherited the farm he would live on it. In the event, he had inherited it only to get rid of it quickly. The thirty acres on one side of the road, with the barn and house and chicken house, he sold to a cousin, and the remaining fifty, fields and woods, he rented to the neighboring farmers, the Reichardts, thus keeping the green space free of development, as his mother would have wanted. He had inherited as well her childhood bird guide, with carefully pencilled annotations and in the back a list of the species she had spotted on this farm—an index of her loneliness, this absorption in birds. One of her tales of herself recalled, with a trace of lingering grievance, how fiercely her mother had scolded her for climbing into a basket of freshly dry wash in imitation of a nesting bird.

Kern, the absentee owner of fifty acres, felt guilty at the rarity of his visits. His career had taken him West. He had retired from teaching English at Macalester College, in St. Paul, and he and his wife, who hated the cold, had moved to Southern California. He drove past his old house with hardly a glance. The cousin had sold it, and then it had been sold again, to a Philadelphian, and renovated beyond recognition. Where sandstone stepping stones had once led the way across a lawn mostly crabgrass, a smooth circular driveway now enclosed a clump of shrubs in shades of green like a nursery display, crowded around a terra-cotta gargoyle. Kern’s mother’s many birdhouses, and her wind chimes on the back porch, were gone.

He kept driving and pulled into the parking lot for the Reichardts’ produce stand. Their farm, one of the few surviving in the region, had prospered as the south of the county filled in with new customers. The Reichardts were pious people but not superstitious about keeping up with the times. Kern’s annual check was now printed by a computer; the simple shed that he remembered, with an awning and a few boards on sawhorses holding bushel baskets of peaches and apples, sweet corn, and string beans, had sprouted freezers and cash registers and supermarket carts and a sizable section of imported gourmet delicacies. Young Tad Reichardt, who usually dealt with Kern on his rare visits, was off with his family for a week at Disney World. “He goes every year, down to Orlando,” a girl at the cash register explained, in the friendly local style. “He says it’s never the same trip—as the children get older, they see different things. Now, you live near Disneyland, I understand.”

“Miles from it. Miles and miles. I’ve never been.”

“Oh. Well, Mr. Reichardt got your letter saying you were coming. He said I was to fetch his father when you did.” Though her hair was worn in a Mennonite cap, she pulled a cell phone from her apron pocket and deftly punched in numbers with her thumb, a trick all young people seem to have.

Kern protested, “There’s no need to bother. I can see for myself. Things are going fine here.”

“He’s here,” she announced into the tiny phone. Within a minute a member of Kern’s own generation, Enoch Reichardt, appeared, damp with rain and grinning widely. They had been boys together, on adjoining farms, but their attempts to play together had not been successful. Enoch, a year younger, had brought a softball and bat over to the Kerns’ yard—the Reichardts had no yard, all the space between their buildings was used for equipment and animals—and David, newly a teen-ager and not yet used to his own strength, had hit the ball far over the barn, into the thorns and poison ivy past the dirt road, next to the tumbledown foundation of the old tobacco-drying shed. The road in those days, before it was macadamized and straightened, swung closer to the barn, to the broad dirt entrance ramp, and then dipped downhill to run along the meadow, under the tulip poplar. Though the boys searched for a scratchy, buggy twenty minutes, they never found the ball, and Enoch never came back to play.

But today, more than fifty years later, he seemed to bear no grudge, and Kern was happy to see someone nearly as old as he looking so well—stocky and tan, repelling the rain as if waxed. His grin showed straight white teeth. Enoch’s teeth had been crooked and brown and must have pained him for years. He asked Kern if he would like to see his fields, how they were being farmed.

“It’s pretty wet out,” Kern said. “I think I get the idea.”
He had arranged to meet two old classmates, with their spouses, at the Alton Country Club that evening, and was wearing a Burberry, a gray suit, and thin-soled black loafers bought at a Simi Valley mall.
Enoch’s uncannily white smile broadened as he explained, “We’ll go in my car. It’ll take hardly a minute. There’s some new ideas around since you were here last. My car’s right outside. David, should I get you an umbrella?”

“Don’t be silly,” Kern said. “It’s just a drizzle.”

“Yes, well. That’s the way I look at it,” Enoch allowed. His car was a comforting relic—a black Ford sedan, with its chrome painted black. The former playmates slithered in. Not far along, on the edge of the enlarged parking lot, which even in this weather held a dozen customers’ cars and vans, stood the first of the new ideas—a kind of quonset hut of white plastic, upheld by arching ribs. “Remember how we used to grow strawberries?” Enoch asked.

“How could I forget?” Strawberries had been David’s 4-H project, a means of making a few hundred dollars a summer toward his eventual college expenses. He and his mother had stood along the road selling them, to his intense embarrassment.

Enoch braked. “Would you like to take a look inside?”

David felt he had no choice, though the rain seemed to be intensifying and his Burberry was rain-resistant rather than rainproof. Enoch roughly, in his proud excitement, widened a gap in the white plastic, and David peeked in. He saw strawberry plants up on several narrow troughs, four feet off the ground, so that the berries, ripe in November, hung down into sheer air like cherries, like Christmas ornaments. “Aquaponic,” Enoch told him. “The plastic keeps the warmth in and allows for the solar effect; all the nutrients are trickled in from a hose. There’s no dirt.”

“No dirt,” David numbly repeated.

“Remember how the berries would rest on the ground and pick up sand? And the turtles and snails would nibble at them before they could be picked?”

“And how your back would ache from straddling the row and bending over. The daddy longlegs would climb up your arms.”

“No more,” Enoch said, pleased that David remembered. “You pick these standing up.”

“Amazing,” Kern conceded, climbing back into the car, after checking the edges of his shoe soles for mud. Enoch wore thick yellow boots and a green slicker over denim bib overalls; he was one with the weather.

He asked, “Would you like me to drive you over the big field?”

“Sure,” David said. “If you won’t get stuck.”

“I don’t think we’ll get stuck.”

In farming the acres, and in selling to people who drove here and picked the fruits and sweet corn themselves, the Reichardts had laid out little roads, firmed up with spalls to check erosion, between the crops. Development, David thought. They drove, slightly skidding, among reserve lengths of PCP irrigation pipe, and dormant rows of strawberries grown through perforated black plastic, and several prefabricated shacks slapped up for the convenience of the summer trade. When the big field was under his mother’s management and lay fallow in clover and wildflowers, David used to mow it through a long August day on their old John Deere tractor, which he could drive before he could drive a car. Bought secondhand and painted mule-gray, the machine had crawled over the terrain gently rocking, dragging behind it the roaring rotary blade in its rusty housing.

“Would you like to get out?” Enoch asked.

The car had gone as far as it could. David looked down at his shoes, and solicitously thought of the crease in his suit pants. He had never been a guest at the Alton Country Club before.

“Sure,” he said. He still owed Enoch that softball. They got out and stood together in the rain. A breeze made itself felt, at this high point of the hill. From here on a clear day you could see the tips of the tallest buildings in Alton, ten miles away. Today the city hid from sight.

As Kern feared, the red earth was as gummy as clay. Transferring his feet from one patch of old-fashioned hay mulch to the next, he watched his steps so carefully that he missed much of Enoch’s friendly lecture on crop rotation, and on new varieties of corn that didn’t take so much nitrogen out of the soil. Soil, Kern thought, looking down. Ancestral soil, and to him it was just mud. He turned his attention upward, to the corner patch of woods that no farmer of these acres, for some reason, had ever bothered to cut, de-stump, and plow.

Feeling his listener’s attention wander, Enoch said, with what seemed a twinkle but might have been raindrops in his eyelashes, “Your mother used to talk about how someday you might build a house up here.”

David said, “Well, I may yet.” He couldn’t resist adding, with a wave over the irrigated and plasticized acres, “And make all this my front yard.”

On the way back, sure enough, the Ford began to slew and wallow in a stretch of puddles a short distance from the paved road. But Enoch downshifted and the black Ford slithered free, and Kern was spared having to get out, in his delicate clothes, and push.

He took away a gift, a paper bag of Enoch’s fresh apples. Heading north toward Alton, he moved from his mother’s territory into his father’s; he and his father, a schoolteacher, had daily driven together in this same direction, away from the farm to the region of schools, of close-packed row houses, of urban pleasures.

Kern was staying the night at the Alton Motor Inn, in West Alton, but was in no hurry to get there—to make his way through a newly developed section of malls and highways sprung up in recent years. He turned off Route 14, past the Jewish cemetery and under the railroad bridge, into Alton, over a bridge that his father, out of work at the start of the Depression, had helped to build, hauling blue-tinged Belgian blocks and tamping them between the trolley tracks. The old man remembered that summer as pure misery, and his son never crossed the bridge without imagining drops of his father’s sweat as part of it, dried into the concrete. Kern’s bloodlines had left not just country traces.

Alton was a dying city, but its occupants persisted in living. The ebb of its prime, which David located in his own boyhood but which his elders put earlier yet, before the Depression, had stranded a population that occupied the tightly built grid like sleepy end-of-summer wasps clustering in an old paper nest. Even in his boyhood the venerable industrial town had been prolific of what the child had thought of as throwaway men—working-class males whose craft or occupation had withered and left them with nothing to do all day but smoke cigarettes and wait for a visit to the local bar to come due. Driving through south Alton, Kern spotted them through the flapping windshield wipers, standing on tiny porches, watching the rain drip from the aluminum awnings and darken the composition sidings up and down the street.

He drove on, into the wide center blocks of Weiser Street where the trolley cars would clang and pass, where the shoppers and moviegoers would throng, and where David, when his parents still lived a trolley-car ride away, would methodically wander through all the five-and-tens, from McCrory’s up to Kresge’s, looking to enlarge his collection of Big Little Books. At a dime apiece, it was possible, even on a thirty-five-cent-a-week allowance, to accumulate a sizable hoard. The five-and-tens all wore warm clouds of perfume and candy scent just inside the entrance doors, and some had pet shops, with canaries and parakeets and goldfish, at the back. Alton, it seemed to him then, had everything you could ever want in life.

He had been told by Ned Miller, one of the few high-school classmates with whom he kept in touch, that Blankenbiller’s Department Store was being torn down, to make way for a new bank. A dying city, Kern thought, and they keep putting up banks. In the old days you couldn’t find a parking space on Weiser Street; now he slid into one without trouble on the Blankenbiller’s side of the square. Not just the grand old department store, with its wrought-iron cage elevators and overhead pneumatic tubes for the whizzing brass cannisters carrying change and receipts from a hidden treasury above, was being torn down: a row of buildings beside it, where Kern remembered shoes and office supplies and hardware being sold, had vanished, baring walls whose sloppy mortar had never been meant to show, and basement chambers, now filled with rubble, that hadn’t seen daylight for a century. Even in the rain, with daylight draining from the autumn afternoon, men were pecking away with their dolefully creaking front-loaders.

His mother had once explained to him how she had gotten fat: she blamed Blankenbiller’s basement restaurant, where the apple or rhubarb or pecan pie à la mode had been irresistibly good, to top off a lunch when she was working in the Christmas season as an extra saleswoman. You got so tired, she explained, standing on your feet being gracious for ten hours; the ordeal had made her a food addict. Kern gazed down into the sodden, brick-strewn grave of his mother’s girlish figure, a figure he had glimpsed only as a toddler. It had been at Blankenbiller’s that, one day when shopping, he had let go of his mother’s hand and got lost, burbling to the floorwalker and wetting his pants.

One of the city’s surplus men, curious as to what Kern was seeing, crept out from one of the few sheltering doorways left on Weiser Street. Kern winced in fear of being asked for a handout; but the man mutely stared with him through the chain-link fence. Kern’s father used to embarrass him, in the city, by talking to strangers; the more disreputable they appeared, the more enthusiastically his father seemed to regard them as potential sources of enlightenment. Kern had been a fastidious, touchy adolescent, but had slowly shed many of his inhibitions. Now he turned to the poorly clad, indifferently shaven stranger and attempted conversation: “Some hole, huh?”

The man turned away, offended by such levity. He might have said “Yeah,” or said nothing at all, Kern wasn’t sure.

The Alton Motor Inn and Function Suites sat slightly north of the river, where Kern’s mental map of the county gave out. North of Alton had always had a different, hostile flavor: the high-school kids were tougher, the industrial landmarks were bigger and darker, and the rich, who had made their millions off the dismal mills and quarries, lived on fenced estates well back from the highways. The geography was a tangle to Kern; confusing new highways sliced through former villages and sped shoppers to malls that were themselves becoming shopworn. Just after his mother’s death, without her to guide him, he had got lost on his way to the Alton airport to meet his children for the funeral. Though he now managed, after several wrong turns, to find the motor inn on its little rounded hill of asphalt, Kern was afraid he could not find, in the dark, in the rain, the Alton Country Club.

The girl at the front desk, dressed in a mannish jacket, had tufty hair dyed in blotches of magenta. To her it was so obvious where the country club was that a few stabs of her pencil at a miniature map and a hurried recitation of several route numbers satisfied her that Kern was as good as there. Uncomprehending, but afraid of appearing senile, he docilely nodded and went to the room. His room, its picture window overlooking the muffled traffic of a mysterious cloverleaf, seemed a safe cave. But his classmates, in deference to their age and frailty, had urged an early dinner hour, so, instead of lying down on one of the inviting twin beds and turning on television, he unpacked his toilet kit, brushed his teeth, changed his tie to a more festive one, and tried to clean his muddy loafers with a wad of moistened toilet paper. Out in the parking lot, the controls of the rented Nissan still seemed foreign, the dashboard miniaturized and dim. There was an invasive sweet smell in the car: he had forgotten Enoch’s apples. Blazing streams of other cars were hurrying home; the county was not so depleted as to lack a rush hour. He was due at six, in just fifteen minutes.

As Kern squinted to see road signs, the headlights behind him pressed mercilessly; those coming at him wore troubling halos of refraction. He had turned off at the route number the neo-punk girl at the hotel desk had written for him, but possibly in the wrong direction. Anonymous mills and storage tanks hulked on one side, with silhouetted conveyor belts and skeletal stairways; on the other, after a distance, a restaurant in an old limestone house advertised itself with a discreet white sign, and, closed for the winter, a driving range and miniature-golf course hurtled by. None of this was exactly unfamiliar—ages ago he and some boisterous friends had played among those windmills and tunnels, or somewhere similar—yet nothing told him exactly where he was. He was being punished: he had lived his formative years in the county while disdaining to learn its geography, beyond the sections proximate to his ego and his selfish needs. Now in revenge, the area manifested itself as a shapeless shadowy mire, experienced at a perilous speed.

Then a sweeping searchlight straight ahead declared, he decided, the presence of the Alton airport. It was down to about two flights a day yet kept its lights on. But it seemed to be, if he remembered the hotel clerk’s sketchy indications, on the wrong side of the highway. Kern was beginning to sweat. He would never get there. The highway surround was thinning into countryside: distant isolated house windows, darkened low stores for carpeting and auto parts. He wanted to scream. He needed to urinate. At last, the broad glow of a combination Getty gas and 7-Eleven appeared. Yet the doughy woman behind the counter—the lone sentinel in a sea of darkness, wearing steel-rimmed granny glasses—seemed frightened of him, her only customer. He saw as if through her oval lenses his pink panicked face and wrinkled Burberry and California-style necktie, splashily patterned in poinciana blossoms. When he explained his disorientation, her face hardened; she appeared offended that he could have gone so far astray. “Go back the way you came,” she told him. “It’s after the airport. You passed it.”

“How far after?”

“Oh—a mile or so.”

“On the right or the left?” These people, it occurred to him, did not want out-of-staters to make themselves too much at home.

“On the left.”

“Is there a sign or anything?”

The woman mulled this over, continuing to size him up and keeping one hand out of sight below the counter, probably on the alarm button. “You’ll see it,” she grudgingly promised. “There’s two big gateposts.”

And Kern did, ten minutes later, see the gateposts, very faintly, on the other side of the road. They might have been ghosts—spectral apparitions between beats of the windshield wipers—but his only hope of refuge lay between them. It was the worst kind of highway, a two-lane wanting to be a three-lane. The streams of traffic behind him and coming toward him looked endless; he braked in the center of the road and, as halted headlights piled up in his rearview mirror, he swerved into the oncoming lane. The lead car gave him a long blast of protest on its horn but braked enough to avoid the head-on collision that Kern’s heart had leaped up to greet.

He was in. A tiny sign in a flowerless flower bed named the club. An allée of horse chestnut trees led him between two areas of darkness—golf-course fairways, he guessed. The clubhouse loomed, spottily lit. There was plenty of parking; it was a weekday night. He got out of the car. His eyes watered; his knees were trembling. Ned Miller was waiting for him in the foyer. “We were getting worried,” Ned said.

"I had trouble finding it,” Kern told him, fervently gripping his old friend’s hand. “Then when I finally found it I nearly got killed pulling in. The guy who had to brake gave me a huge blast.”

“That’s a bad left turn. You should have been coming from the other direction.”

“I know, I know. Don’t rub it in. I’ll do better next time. Maybe.” Ned said nothing; both men were estimating that there might not be a next time.

Ned had been, like Kern, a good student, but less erratically and noisily so. He spoke no more than he needed to, and talkative Kern, so excitable he sometimes stuttered as the words crowded in, had realized that Ned was his best friend only when he realized that silence was the other boy’s natural, companionable mode. Ned’s head was full of unvoiced thoughts; they were for him a reservoir of strength. He had become a lawyer, a professional keeper of secrets.

The three other guests were seated at the table, their faces glamorously lit by glass-shaded candles. Ned’s wife was Marjorie, a firm-textured, silver-haired graduate of a different high school, north of Alton. Kern’s other classmate he had known as Sandra Auerbach, though she had long since married one of Ned’s legal partners, Jeff Lang. It must have been Ned’s sly, considerate idea to include the Langs, since Kern had, at a safe distance, loved Sandra all through school. It had taken no great imagination to love her—she was conspicuously vivacious, an athlete and a singer as well as the class beauty. He had heard, though, that she had fallen prey to various ills. He wondered if the aluminum walker tucked over by the windows was hers. Even as he gratefully took the place they had saved for him, beside Sandra, he observed that her face had been stiffened and distorted by some sort of stroke. Yet, since his love for her had been born in kindergarten, before sex kicked in, it was purely spiritual and impervious to bodily change.

In his happiness to be next to her, he gushed, “Sandra, I had the most terrible time getting here, not knowing where anything is anymore. Not that I ever did. Furthermore my night vision isn’t that great. All the headlights had this rainbowy hair on them. In my panic I pulled right into the path of an oncoming car, and even in that split second I was thinking, Well, Stupid, you were born here, you might as well die here. Was the traffic always this bad?”

She stared at him out of her stony, twisted face, and with a spasmodic motion lifted her hand toward his lips as if to touch them, to still them. “David,” she said carefully, “I don’t hear well. Speak more slowly, and let me watch your mouth.” Her hair, a silky chestnut-brown permitted some streaks of gray, was sleekly swept back; he saw that the socket of her dainty ear was daintily filled by a flesh-colored hearing aid. But her voice had kept its old quiet confidence; she had never had to shout to get attention. Except for her bust, spectacularly bloomed by the eighth grade, Sandra’s physical attributes were precise rather than emphatic; she was like a photograph slightly reduced to achieve an extra sharpness. Her nose had a barely noticeable bump at the bridge and her mouth a slight, demure, enchanting overbite. Kern’s lips tingled where Sandra had almost touched them.

He slowly mouthed, for her eyes, the words “It’s won-der-ful to see you. I’m sor-ry I was late.”

The general conversation sought its rhythm, and David, the returned prodigal, for a time was assigned the lead voice. But the questions he asked, the details he remembered, related to a few decades that for him had the freshness and urgency of youthful memories but that for his friends were buried beneath a silt of decades, of thousands of days spent in this same territory, maturing, marrying, childbearing, burying parents, laboring, retiring. He called across the table to Ned, “Remember how our mothers used to take us out once a summer to the Goose Lake Amusement Park, at the end of the trolley line? They would sit there,” he explained to the others, “side by side on a bench, while Ned and I went into the arcade and put pennies in these little paper peepshows that you cranked yourself—girls doing the hoochy-coochy in petticoats, all very tame, in retrospect. What the kids nowadays see, my God.”

Decades of teaching had left him perhaps too fluent. He evoked aloud the long-gone trolley cars—their slippery straw seats, the brass handles at the corners to switch the backs back and forth at the end of the line, the serious-faced conductor with the mechanical changemaker on his belt.

“Every child had to have one,” Ned chimed in. “As a toy.”

“Exactly!” Kern agreed. He recalled aloud Ned’s old house—its abundance of toys, its basement playroom, its side yard big enough for fungo, and the slate-floored screened side porch where they used to play Monopoly for hours. Kern, a poor schoolteacher’s son, had envied that house, and intended to praise it. But he got the name of Ned’s pet Labrador slightly wrong, Blackie instead of Becky; Ned made the correction with an uncharacteristic, irritated quickness.

Monopoly made Kern think of the canasta craze in their junior and senior years, those rows and rows of cards laid out on their parents’ dining-room tables, and asked if anybody could still remember the rules. Nobody volunteered. Marjorie Miller began to look glazed, and stated firmly that no one in her high school played canasta; it never spread, she insisted, to this part of the county.

Deferential waiters, meanwhile, took orders and brought food. They kept calling Ned “Mr. Miller” and Sandra “Mrs. Lang”; only Kern went unnamed, the club outsider. He had his own clubs, far from here, but had he stayed he could never have made the Alton Country Club; there was no road for him up into it.

As, feeling the fatigue of his day’s adventures, he fell relatively silent, his companions lapsed into local talk—the newest mayoral scandal in Alton, the hopeless condition of the downtown, the misfortunes (illnesses, business misjudgments, ill-advised second marriages) of mutual friends. Kern thought that Sandra kept up with the conversation pretty well, her calm gray-blue eyes darting from mouth to mouth, her own lips opening in a frequent laugh. When she laughed, the gleeful pealing, a bit shriller than expected, sounded a chord in Kern’s head first heard during recess at elementary school, on the little asphalt lake around the old red brick building, strictly divided into boys’ and girls’ sections. Her voice, though not loud, could be heard over those of all the other girls at play. He must have been listening for it.

The waiters—two of them, for this was a light night—stood ready, in their pleated shirts and striped bow ties, to take orders for dessert and coffee. The group looked toward Kern, and he said what he sensed they wanted to hear: “I don’t need anything. It’s late for us old-timers.” There was a babble of grateful agreement, and a pronged fuss of gathering coats and umbrellas. Sandra used her walker, but as if it were a plaything, swinging it jauntily ahead of her. Outside, the rain had stopped, and Kern could see off to the left a shadowy green, with its numbered flag still in the hole, ready for play if November relented.

On the glistening driveway, they shook hands and hugged goodbye. He and Sandra studied each other’s face a second, trying to decide between a kiss on the cheek or on the mouth; he decided on a cheek—as it happened on the side somewhat paralyzed. Backing off, he said, “Take care. You’re the best.” Not sure the lamplight was strong enough for her to read his words, he absurdly gave her a thumbs-up, and blushed.
Marjorie, hugging him almost too firmly, said, “We’re all in one car; you follow us. We don’t want you getting lost again.”

“Oh, I don’t think I will. I just do the same thing backwards, more or less. Don’t go out of your way. Ways.”

“David. You follow us.”

The four had come in a big midnight-blue S.U.V. belonging to the Langs. Marjorie’s silver hair flashed in the back seat; Sandra’s tidy profile sank into shadow beside her. Women rode contentedly in the back seat here. Jeff Lang’s tail-lights led Kern down the long, hushed double row of horse chestnuts; at the highway, after a wait for all traffic to clear, the tail-lights turned left, away from the airport, then right at the restaurant in the limestone house. Almost immediately, they were moving down narrow city streets. They had been on the edge of Alton, all along. What was I doing way out at the airport? Kern asked himself.

This section of the city was strange to him. Lone pedestrians flitted warily across the rain-stained streets. The glowing windows of laundromats, delicatessens, and corner taverns slid by like the illumined spectres and tableaux in the water ride at the Goose Lake Amusement Park. Some of the signs were in Spanish. The S.U.V., seeming almost to brush the parked cars on either side, led him first downhill, and then up. Continuing uphill, the street smoothly became a strange bridge, high above the black river. It descended on the other side into blocks where gaunt semi-detached houses were approached up long flights of concrete steps. The two-car caravan came to a traffic circle near a large parking lot, with a garish state-run liquor store on one side, and Kern at last knew where he was: in West Alton.

He and his mother used to come to West Alton from the trolley stop in front of Blankenbiller’s for his piano lessons with—yes, of course—Miss Schiffner. Thin, wan, wistful Miss Schiffner, perhaps once beautiful in her way, had he not been too young to notice. Concrete steps covered by green outdoor carpeting led up to her front parlor, where the upright piano waited amid doilies and porcelain figurines and dusty plush. Its white-and-black teeth were cold to touch, with his nervous hands. The keyboard had a right-angled lid that came down after the lesson, protecting the keys against dust. The trolley car at its stop—there had been no traffic circle then—would unfold a step with a harsh clack and David, leaping down, jarred the sour dread in his belly at not having mastered his lesson. This was before their move to the country, the beginning of his exile. His mother was still a city dweller, still banking on civilization, handing over precious Depression dollars in gullible hopes of lifting her son up from the ruck. It was clear to him and must have been to Miss Schiffner that he was no little Mozart, standing on tiptoe to tap out his first minuet.

Jeff Lang’s smug ruby tail-lights continued halfway around the traffic circle, passed the liquor store, and headed up Fourth Street, toward the old textile mills that had been reborn as discount outlets and then had gone empty again, as the busloads of Baltimore bargain hunters went instead to the outlets near Morgan’s Forge. It came to Kern that behind him, one block over from Fourth Street, there used to be an all-night diner where he, in no hurry to get back to the farm, would go alone after dropping off his date at her house. After a school dance, he would go with a gang of others, all the girls wearing strapless taffeta dresses if it had been a prom, their naked shoulders shining in the booths. Each booth had its own little jukebox, with “Stardust” and “Begin the Beguine” and Russ Morgan’s “So Tired” among the selections. If Kern went there now, he could get a piece of Dutch apple pie with a scoop of butter-pecan ice cream, to make up for the dessert he had missed.

He wanted to reverse his course, but the Langs’ tail-lights inexorably receded, waiting at every intersection for him to catch up. He couldn’t believe it: they were going to lead him like some moron right to the parking lot of the Alton Motor Inn. In his head he shouted furiously, I know where I am now! I’m here.