This is how we gained dominion over the animals, you know. Our ability to predict future behaviors based on our experience of the past. Our ability to make up fictions. We do live in the past and future simultaneously, don’t we?
What am I talking about? Good grief, how do you put up with me? I’m sorry. But the context is essential. It is essential that you understand.
I agree, I say.
You’re my child but you were never a child. I’m sorry for that. I’m beyond believing anything I could say would help you. That ship sailed a long time ago. But I’ll tell you what you want to know.
I needed to unburden myself, my father says, but I couldn’t tell Ben because I couldn’t live with the shame of it, and something told me he’d suffered far worse than I had. What did I have to complain about? I had my life! I had my arms and legs! I didn’t want to sound like some sort of coward. I certainly couldn’t tell my mother or father. Never. But if we’d stayed close, Ben and I, I would have had to tell him. You see how these decisions are made? These deep, unspoken fears that govern our lives? Of course I’d have told him if I’d been near him, so in order to make that impossible, I engineered a life far from him.
And let me tell you something. To hell with prison. To hell with classified activities. That wasn’t what stopped me from telling him. It was shame that stopped me.
What is it you would have told him, Dad?
Yes, yes. Even now I’m avoiding the subject, is that it? Fine, then. Fine.
My father looked again to the ceiling and said, You know that in ’42 Donovan recruited me out of school because I spoke good Polish and had been to the country a few times when I was a boy—a professor in the Department of Slavic Studies put him on to me. He took four of us. Mazur, Wojcik, Bissel, and me, because we spoke the language and knew the country. I believe Wojcik had only been in the U.S. for a couple of years. Family had fled Poland for political reasons. So, it was because of your grandmother’s bloodline that I was scooped up by OSS.
I was twenty years old. Certainly twenty was a different proposition at that time. But at twenty, regardless, experience plays no role in your decisions. If you were someone like me, what you called experience was Hardy, Yeats, Graves, Edward Thomas. Hemingway, of course. But you didn’t understand what they were trying to tell you. You’re excited by the idea of dying on the field, dying for a cause. I believed their experience to be mine. So it wasn’t my uniform I wore, but theirs.
I was based in Washington for a year, assigned to a branch that worked closely with British intelligence. Highly decentralized command structure. I don’t think I saluted more than a handful of times. It was a real circus, that place. Donovan was a ball of charisma, and whenever he met a new man he became instantly smitten with the possibilities—this man would be the one to win the war. Then you left the room and he forgot all about you. Within reason, an intelligent person could do what he wanted at OSS. Do you know what I worked on?
You helped write manuals.
That’s right. I was recruited for my Polish, but once I got there I sought out the writers, and they needed someone with a pulse to type up the Morale Operations manual, so I got myself taken off radio intercept work and put into the typing brigade.
After the Morale Ops manual was finished, they put the squad to work adapting a British field manual. This was the fall of ’43. The British manuals were field-tested. They were clear, devoid of the usual military mumbo-jumbo, and they followed a distinct, very English line of reasoning. The language and structure of the manual itself taught you to think in the particular logical fashion they intended to teach you. Quite something.
Do you know what simple sabotage is? my father says.
No.
We had a two-pronged approach to sabotage, he says. Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls blowing up the bridge is sabotage work, full stop. You parachute into France, connect with the Maquis, spend a few weeks plotting in a hayloft, and then on the new moon you infiltrate a power plant, lay charges, cut the fuses, blow the turbines, and escape back to the safe house. Extraordinarily dangerous work.
The second type, simple sabotage, was a practical philosophy that was to be laid out in field manual number three, the one we were working on that fall. The goal was to turn average citizens into saboteurs without putting them at risk. The idea was that if properly motivated, anyone could do it. Factory workers, file clerks, plumbers. Anyone could fight the German war machine. And if everyone in the country is fighting the Germans, well.
My father tips his chin back and speaks again into the space above his head: His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, the trash pile, his own usual kit of tools and supplies.
That’s ours, he says. We used it as a little code around the office, a little joke in the mess as we were filling our coffee cups. His arsenal is the kitchen shelf. It’s more than sufficient, isn’t it? Very catchy. Nice rhythm, wouldn’t you say?
He is smiling crookedly at me, eyebrows arched, a look I know well. Professorial, my paternal interlocutor. I am supposed to puzzle out the line.
Ah? he says and dips his chin so that those misty blue eyes peer over the tops of his black frames.
His arsenal is the kitchen shelf, I say.
He whispers it back to me slowly, his hand pressing the rhythm into the skin of my forearm. His ARE senal IS the KIT chen SHELF.
Iambs, I say.
Good, he says, squeezing. The meter?
I repeat it in my head. Tetrameter.
Now, isn’t that nice? he says. And the alliteration—do you hear the snake and the silence? S, s, tch, sh. Subversive, dangerous silence. You understand the attention lavished on every letter? All this care for a manual, a tool for outlining principles and objectives, a military booklet. Then “the trash pile.” Bacchius, a trisyllable. Drops like a brick through the skylight. The trash pile, rank and smelly. Not “refuse heap.” Too soft. Hard t. Hard p. It’s jammed in there like a wrong note. And then back to iambs at the end. Great thought went into every line. I spent the better part of six months watching them work, and they worked urgently, these men and women. Before the war they’d been screenwriters, poets, journalists—published writers. They’d argue over a paragraph break for half a day, resolve the issue, then pick it up again the next morning because one of them was foolish enough to say, “Confirming the break in section B of paragraph two, page fifteen.” Back at each other’s throats. We worked until midnight and they went home to their screenplays and their stalled novels. They drank so much they had gills. By the winter of ’44 you couldn’t find whiskey anywhere, so they were on terrible stuff, bathtub hooch. Mornings were unpleasant. Those who drank at night were hungover, and those who drank in the daylight hadn’t gotten warmed up yet. The couriers knew better than to knock before lunch.
I suppose I contributed in small ways. My job was to take notes, mark changes on the working document, and at night to type up fresh pages for the morning. I followed every peregrination, every line change, every rearrangement of the steps a field agent was to take in disseminating the sabotage message. It became a part of my existence—it’s not unusual for the apprentice to know the form of the work better than the master, who has to create the form and is therefore occupied with all sorts of thorny questions of philosophy and craft. He’s in argument with the medium most of the time. But I was free to absorb the manual’s deeper questions and internalize its precepts.