He came to the gate, took hold of the little one and detached him from the bars, despite his protests. The square man in the white short-sleeved shirt (a caretaker? a bodyguard? a gardener?) emerged from the sentry box and began to repeat the information he had gathered, mispronouncing my name, trying to make himself heard above the squeals of the child. But already Vinner was speaking to me in Russian and let me in through the door next to the sentry box.
"I'm really sorry but today I'm taking these two rascals to Miracle Strip Park. I've been promising them this since Christmas. Do you know this park? It's full of attractions for kids. There's even a giant roller-coaster, I don't know how many feet high. So is our friend well? China just now must be quite something. I think he's told me about you. Dave, quit shoving him or you won't get to come with us."
He uttered this threat in English, in that good comprehensible English that gives foreigners away, and threw me a glance in which feigned severity mutated into a father's smiling pride. I noted that his face had changed very little and that his eyes had even kept that youthful brightness that had so touched you in the old days. It was his body that had matured a good deaclass="underline" he had a belly now and his forearms filled the short sleeves of his T-shirt with the flabby bulk you see in athletes who have given up exercise. A tall, fair-haired woman came out of the house, went in again at once and reappeared with a large red thermos. She came toward us, Vinner introduced me, she shook my hand, and I had time to notice that her face showed signs of morning-time distraction, that withdrawal women regularly permit themselves to inflict on their families. The children were shouting impatiently and pushing their father toward the car. I still had the map of Florida under my arm and a loaded pistol in my bag. With one hand I slung this bag over my shoulder and pushed it behind my back, just as one hides a sharp object from children.
Vinner proposed that we should meet again the next day.
That night, recalling his facial expressions, I realized that his features, even though attached to a hated name, had brought the sound of your voice back to life for me, the calmness of your gaze, a few days in our old existence, some of those moments of happiness lost among the wanderings and the wars.
Then, recalling Shakh's warning, in which he had given me the first ten minutes to attack and win, I recognized my defeat. I had a vision of Vinner's two children, hurtling down the roller-coaster. In any case, I was finding it harder and harder to define what victory might have been.
Contemplating the beach that stretched away a few yards from the terrace on stilts where we sat, Vinner had the proud and smiling air of the cocreator of this sun-drenched panorama. Rather as a Parisian, when showing a foreigner the Arc de Triomphe or the Louvre, always feels a little bit as if he were the architect, or at least one of the stone masons. He recited his commentary, pointing into the distance with his fork, and reeling off the names of fish and shellfish, gave a little laugh and threw me a wink at the sight of a pretty girl in a swimsuit walking past the terrace. And when a group of young men in bathing suits rushed toward the waves, shouting at one another as they ran and tossing a big beach ball back and forth over the heads of the vacationers, he smiled indulgently and explained that these disturbers of the peace were, alas, inevitable during the period of the "spring break." He pronounced this phrase with evident pleasure.
"It makes a change from the rain in Paris, doesn't it? And those anemic Europeans. I remember one day on a beach somewhere near… La Rochelle, was it? I'm probably getting mixed up. It was so depressing, all those appalling bodies, it looked like a museum of degeneration. Especially the women. And here, you can see, these young ones are bursting with health. And even the not so young, they're in good shape. And the air. Just smell it! Not an atom of nicotine. No one smokes. After two days in Europe I'm coughing and spluttering like an old man. And in Eastern Europe, forget it. It's worse than Chernobyl… She's not bad, that one. No, the other one, under the shower. Yes, maybe a bit too much, you're right. But the women here are all very athletic. Very healthy. In fact, you know that new man our propaganda promised us: here's where he's in the process of being born. Stalin thought he could forge him through a schizophrenic mix of terror and heroism. Hitler, via biological mes-sianism. But here they don't need brainwashing. Everyone understands that, as one of my friends says, it's better to be healthy, tanned, and rich than a Russian research scientist in Moscow."
When he spoke of America Vinner sometimes said "they," sometimes "we." I interrupted him two or three times to ask, " 'We' is who? The Russians or the Americans?" I did it from annoyance but also to avoid confusion between the "we" who were "putting a little order into this whorehouse of a world" and the "we" who "are only good at begging for handouts from the West, instead of getting on with the job." Smiling, he accepted the correction and, for several minutes, paid careful attention to his use of pronouns. The good "we" were fulfilling their onerous mission, as masters of the world, by punishing the guilty and defending the righteous, but above all by demonstrating, through their example, that the formula for universal happiness had been found and that it was within everyone's reach. A moment later the confusion returned and the bad "we" had embarked on "drinking, behaving hysterically like something straight out of Dostoyevsky, begging for dollars."
There were, it is true, many beautiful bodies on the beach's extremely pale sands. Both their youth and the relaxed insolence of their movements swept aside any attempt at criticism. The happiness was too evident, it was on their skin, in their muscles, in the stream of cars coming from the north to spill out these tanned bodies onto the sand and the terraces, or to carry them on toward other pleasures. Their exuberant vitality seemed to be saying: "Go ahead and grumble as much as you like. But we're the ones who are right!"
In any case, what Vinner was saying was more or less his regular recruitment test number, a well-worn speech for sounding out the opinions of research scientists he enlisted in Eastern Europe. He knew that you learn more about a man, not by letting him talk, but by talking to him and observing his reactions. Instead of objecting to it, I was trying to imagine the objections of previous listeners. What could they have said, faced with Vinner's guided tour of this paradise? Some of them, no doubt, nodded their heads for fear of displeasing their benefactor. Others, remembering their post-war Soviet childhood, would have embarked, with the aid of nostalgia, on a defense of poverty, which, it appears, promotes loftiness of thought. Yet others, the most ungrateful and generally the most independent, thanks to their scientific clout, would have dared to remind him that this oasis of the American Dream had its price and, with typically Russian exaggeration, would have begun talking about slavery, Hiroshima, napalm in Vietnam, and sometimes, in a fit of rage (what Vinner called "hysteria straight out of Dostoyevsky") rebelled, crying out, "Yes, of course you're the richest and the strongest! But that's because you pillage the whole world. Your damned America is draining our lifeblood! Do you think you can buy everything with your dollars?" At such moments Vinner would remain silent. He knew only too well the explosive but forgetful temperament of his former compatriots. But above all he was convinced that one really could buy everything. And that the hysteria was only a passing symptom on the part of a person he was in the process of buying.
It struck me that a further objection could be added to all of these: the wars started in order to test new weapons and those ended in order to lower the price of a barrel of crude oil. And a good many other negative aspects of things besides. But I let Vinner finish his performance, as one lets a guide complete the tour of a site of no interest. He did not have a coffee but some extremely frothy milk drink. And his concluding comments (he was speaking of the success of the "melting pot": "In the sun all cats are brown, isn't that so?") were accompanied by rhythmic gurgling and sucking noises. I reflected that the only counterargument in harmony with the genial tone of our meeting would have been to criticize the obesity of some of the vacationers around us. Vinner looked at his watch and hastened to bring matters to a close.