Heidigger was nodding encouragement. “Now the country,” he said. “I know you have been feeling like a trained seal, Miles. You’ll soon see why. Have you any ideas about the country?”
Dorn worried his lower lip. “Yes, I do,” he said. “They came to me while I was talking. I think I know the country.”
“Yes?”
“This is annoying. If I’m wrong, I will sound ridiculous. You see, I have not made any attempt to keep up with international politics. I have no idea what it’s like over there politically or economically.”
“I understand.”
“I take it for granted that there are some purposeful inaccuracies in your story. That the blacks and the whites are not necessarily Negroes and Caucasians, for example. And that other elements have been rearranged in similar fashion.”
“Go on. You fascinate me right now, Miles.”
“Do I? The catch is that I am sure I would not care to operate there, and I am fucking certain you wouldn’t. I don’t think you could if you wanted to.”
“Tell me the country. Now it’s you who is being theatrical. Tell me the country.”
Dorn said, “Israel. They’ve got their own country now, so there’s no sound reason why the Jews can’t be fascists just like anyone else. The native Arabs are the blacks in your parable. The neighboring Arabs are the colonial guerrillas. I know nothing of their economy or politics, but the conditions you describe could conceivably exist there. And it explains another thing, damn it.”
“What?”
“Your presentation. There has to be a payoff. All this can’t lead up to some African shithole that I never heard the name of. It has to be outrageous; that’s obviously why we’re going through this intricate dance step. There are more outrageous things than Eric Heidigger engineering a fascist putsch in Israel, but I’d hate to have to list them.”
“It’s not Israel.”
“No?” Dorn was surprised. “You didn’t laugh.”
“I was too staggered by the thought. Your mind does make nice jumps. King of the Jews! What a luscious notion. No, the situation is not right there at all, politically or economically. But it is an amazing thought, and I would not like to bet heavily that the conditions might not be right in five years or ten. Not that they’re likely to invite us to come in.”
“Do I have to guess again?”
“No.” Heidigger bounced to his feet. “No! Enough guessing. I would be distraught if you guessed right. There was some trickery in my little speech. Not what you suspected — the blacks are black and the whites are white. Part of my deception was geographic. I turned the country upside down and backward. That is our objective, is it not? To turn the country upside down and backwards?”
“So the intellectual center—”
“Is not the southwest but the northeast. And the depressed area is not the northwest but the southeast. And the demagogue’s financial backing comes not from the East but from the West.” Heidigger’s eyes flashed. Beads of sweat dotted his head. He was speaking louder and more intensely. “And the two charismatic left-centrists were brothers, and one of them was assassinated by an Arab and the other by a Cuban sympathizer. And the cops put down another of the niggers Wednesday.
“Do you see why I had to go through all that hypothetical drivel? Because otherwise you would have thought of a million reasons why it can’t happen. The shit a man never sees is the shit he’s standing in. That’s why the Jews didn’t get out of Germany. They were too close to it. They were in the middle of it. They were up to their necks in shit before anyone even suggested opening a window.
“But you took the facts and wrote the script, Miles Dorn. You can’t say it can’t be done. You just said how it can be done.” He threw himself down in the chair again. He folded his arms, put his left foot on his right knee. “It can be done,” he said, his voice at whisper level now. “Everything’s right. Everything. It will fall in our laps.”
Dorn was white. He was shivering, and could barely keep his balance. The floor seemed miles away. Miles from Croatia. Vertigo. That was her cat’s name, Vertigo.
“In our laps,” he heard Heidigger saying. His voice seemed far off, faint, filtered. “The United States of America. In our laps.”
Three
It had been perhaps twenty years since Dorn read Der Fragebogen, but whole passages of it were etched on his mind. The book was an autobiography couched in the form of an acerbically whimsical response to a questionnaire prepared at the war’s close for an Allied denazification program. The author was Ernst Von Salomon, Walther Rathenau’s assassin and a highly placed writer and editor in Goebbels’ propaganda ministry.
Dorn, a Croat, had spent the war years with Ante Pavelic, killing Serbs and Titoist partisans. He had not been subject to any equivalent of denazification. It had simply been necessary for him to leave Yugoslavia. Yet there had been much in Von Salomon’s arrogant apologia that struck chords then that echoed twenty years later.
Now, hunched on an aisle seat of a speeding Greyhound bus, he particularly recalled one passage. Von Salomon, a fascist activist since the twenties, discussed the dismay with which he and several close friends regarded the Hitler regime during its first years. These were young men, Von Salomon and his friends. Idealists. Patriots. Visionaries. They despised the Austrian corporal and his Brownshirts. How then to explain their subsequent acts?
“Together we swore an oath. There were two things we would not do. We would not commit suicide, and we would not leave the country.”
Dorn had never made the mistake of crediting Der Fragebogen with any particular relationship to truth. One did not, after all, cultivate a reverence for truth in the ministry of propaganda, nor did one learn credulity in Dorn’s life schools. But that three-sentence explanation, awful in its simplicity, had an irresistible ring to it. From a simple negative decision against death and emigration all the rest of it flowed like water.
Dorn could scarcely remember being a young man. He had never been an idealist, a patriot, a visionary. Thoughts of both death and departure were oddly comforting.
But survival was a habit he had acquired, and flight a habit he had given up. He was not given to oaths, but he, like Von Salomon, recognized two things he would not do. He would not commit suicide, and he would not leave the country.
A ten-minute rest stop somewhere in Georgia. Dorn used the lavatory, shut himself in a stall. The toilet bowl was stained, the seat’s plastic cover cracked, the floor filthy. The toilet paper dispenser provided little squares of airmail stationery one at a time. The American bathroom, indeed!
(Before he left Heidigger, during a conversational lapse, Dorn had suddenly said, “But they have no bidets.” And to Heidigger’s blank look he had explained, “The American bathrooms that you praised. They have no bidets. Perhaps that could be embodied in our leader’s program.”
Heidigger had bounced up. “But there is a bidet! In my very bathroom. In this Holiday Inn.” Dorn said he hadn’t noticed it.
“Go in now. See for yourself.”
“I’ll take your word for it.”
“But there is no need to take my word for it. Take ten steps and see for yourself. If you were a young lady, I would invite you to have a complimentary douche, but at least you may see for yourself.”
He had laughed sharply, laughter that Heidigger had not understood. “Eric,” he had said at length, “Eric, I am not going to examine your bidet. I am going to trust you that there is a bidet in your bathroom. Eric, if I cannot trust you on the matter of a bidet in a bathroom, then we are in serious trouble.”)