People in the habit of asking themselves silent useless questions look for answers in mirrors. My hair was blond again now that it had dried. I looked less like my idea of my father. I tried to see the reflection of the man who had gone out in the middle of the night and who never came back. You don't go out alone to tear down election posters in a village where nobody thinks as you do — not unless you want to be stabbed in the back. So the family had said.
“You were well out of it,” I said to the shadow that floated on the glass panel of the china cabinet, though it would not be my father's again unless I could catch it unaware.
I said to myself, It is quieter than France. They keep their radios low.
In captivity I had never suffered a pain except for the cramps of hunger the first years, which had been replaced by a scratching, morbid anxiety, and the pain of homesickness, which takes you in the stomach and the throat. Now I felt the first of the real pains that were to follow me like little dogs for the rest of my life, perhaps: The first compressed my knee, the second tangled the nerves at the back of my neck. I discovered that my eyes were sensitive and that it hurt to blink.
This was the hour when, in Brittany, I would begin peeling the potatoes for dinner. I had seen food my mother had never heard of — oysters, and artichokes. My mother had never seen a harbor or a sea.
My American prisoner had left his immediate life spread on an alien meadow — his parachute, his revolver, his German money. He had strolled into captivity with his hands in his pockets.
“I know what you are thinking,” said my mother, who was standing behind me. “I know that you are judging me. If you could guess what my life has been — the whole story, not only the last few years — you wouldn't be hard on me.”
I turned too slowly to meet her eyes. It was not what I had been thinking. I had forgotten about her, in that sense.
“No, no, nothing like that,” I said. I still did not touch her. What I had been moving along to in my mind was: Why am I in this place? Who sent me here? Is it a form of justice or injustice? How long does it last?
“Now we can wait together for Chris,” she said. She seemed young and happy all at once. “Look, Thomas. A new moon. Bow to it three times. Wait — you must have something silver in your hand.” I saw that she was hurrying to finish with this piece of nonsense before Martin came back. She rummaged in the china cabinet and brought out a silver napkin ring — left behind by the vanished tenants, probably. The name on it was “Meta” — no one we knew. “Bow to the moon and hold it and make your wish,” she said. “Quickly.”
“You first.”
She wished, I am sure, for my brother. As for me, I wished that I was a few hours younger, in the corridor of a packed train, clutching the top of the open window, my heart hammering as I strained to find the one beloved face.
IN TRANSIT
AFTER THE Cook's party of twenty-five Japanese tourists had departed for Oslo, only four people were left in the waiting room of the Helsinki airport — a young French couple named Perrigny, who had not been married long, and an elderly pair who were identifiably American. When they were sure that the young people two benches forward could not understand them, the old people went on with a permanent, flowing quarrel. The man had the habit of reading signs out loud, though perhaps he did it only to madden his wife. He read the signs over the three doors leading out to the field: “‘Oslo.’ ‘Amsterdam.’ ‘Copenhagen.’… I don't see ‘Stockholm.’”
She replied, “What I wonder is what I have been to you all these years.”
Philippe Perrigny, who understood English, turned around, pretending he was looking at Finnish pottery in the showcases on their right. He saw that the man was examining timetables and tickets, all the while muttering “Stockholm, Stockholm,” while the woman looked away. She had removed her glasses and was wiping her eyes. How did she arrive at that question here, in the Helsinki airport, and how can he answer? It has to be answered in a word: everything/nothing. It was like being in a country church and suddenly hearing the peasant priest put a question no one cares to consider, about guilt or duty or the presence of God, and breathing with relief when he has got past that and on to the prayers.
“In the next world we will choose differently,” the man said. “At least I know you will.”
The wild thoughts of the younger man were: They are chained for the rest of this life. Too old to change? Only a brute would leave her now? They are walking toward the door marked AMSTERDAM, and she limps. That is why they cannot separate. She is an invalid. He has been looking after her for years. They are going through the Amsterdam door, whatever their tickets said. Whichever door they take, they will see the circular lanes of suburbs, and the family cars outside each house, and in the backyard a blue pool. All across northern Europe streets are named after acacia trees, but they may not know that.
Perrigny was on his wedding trip, but also on assignment for his Paris paper, and he assembled the series on Scandinavia in his mind. He had been repeating for four years now an article called “The Silent Cry,” and neither his paper nor he himself had become aware that it was repetitious. He began to invent again, in the style of the Paris weeklies: “It was a silent anguished cry torn from the hearts and throats…” No. “It was a silent song, strangled…” “It was a silent passionate hymn to…” This time the beginning would be joined to the blue-eyed puritanical north; it had applied to Breton farmers unable to get a good price for their artichokes, to the Christmas crowd at the Berlin Wall, to Greece violated by tourists, to Negro musicians performing at the Olympia music hall, to miserable Portuguese fishermen smuggled into France and dumped on the labor market, to poets writing under the influence of drugs.
The old man took his wife's hand. She was still turned away, but dry-eyed now, and protected by glasses. To distract her while their tickets were inspected he said rapidly, “Look at the nice restaurant, the attractive restaurant. It is part outside and part inside, see? It is inside and outside.”
Perrigny's new wife gently withdrew her hand from his and said, “Why did you leave her?”
He had been expecting this, and said, “Because she couldn't concentrate on one person. She was nice to everybody, but she couldn't concentrate enough for a marriage.”
“She was unfaithful.”
“That too. It came from the same lack of concentration. She had been married before.”
“Oh? She was old?”
“She's twenty-seven now. She was afraid of being twenty-seven. She used to quote something from Jane Austen — an English writer,” he said as Claire frowned. “Something about a woman that age never being able to hope for anything again. I wonder what she did hope for.”
“The first husband left her, too?”
“No, he died. They hadn't been married very long.”
“You did leave her?” said the girl, for fear of a possible humiliation — for fear of having married a man some other woman had thrown away.
“I certainly did. Without explanations. One Sunday morning I got up and dressed and went away. I came back when she wasn't there and took my things away — my tape recorder, my records. I came back twice for my books. I never saw her again except to talk about the divorce.”
“Weren't you unhappy, just walking out that way? You make it sound so easy.”
“I don't admire suffering,” he said, and realized he was echoing his first wife. Suffering was disgusting to her; the emblem of dirt was someone like Kafka alone in a room distilling blows and horror.
“Nobody admires suffering,” said the girl, thinking of aches and cramps. “She had a funny name.”