American Romantic by Ward Just Read Free Book Online

the hammock and stepped across the lawn to the villa. He fetched a bottle of lager from the fridge and stood in the kitchen looking across the tree shadows to the hammock and the high hedge beyond. Sieglinde was invisible but the hammock looked full, motionless in the still night air. The neighbor’s cat, black with white paws, scuttled up the ficus tree and sat on the low branch. Harry lit a cigarette and walked back outside, as contented as he had ever been. More than content. He had the idea that he could snap his fingers and summon an orchestra or a black-tied waiter with a tray full of champagne. The grass was wet underfoot, cool to the touch. It took a moment to resettle in the hammock, cigarette in one hand and the bottle of lager in the other. Sieglinde took one long pull on the cigarette and another from the bottle of lager and closed her eyes again, settling her head on his shoulder. In a growly sort of voice, Harry began to tell her about the clinic and Village Number Five, the headman with the bundle in his arms. The settlement was immaculate, not even a gum wrapper or cigarette stub, his own silence in the face of it all. He stopped there, the experience so strange in retrospect he was unable to describe it with precision—and he realized then that he would have this story for the rest of his life and in time it would become as shopworn as a much-used passport, the visa stamps smudged, illegible dates, illegible signatures, the hodgepodge of a traveler’s life. His own photograph was anonymous, not a good likeness; his signature was undecipherable. What had been crisp was now blurred. The bare bones of a well-told story required coherence, ironic asides, and a plot as well knit and tied together as a jigsaw puzzle and somewhere in it a detail as provocative as a cat in a tree.
    Go on, Sieglinde said.
    I’m thinking, Harry replied. What he meant was, I’m trying to get the sequence of things straight in my own mind. The exact time of day. The precise shape of the headman’s bundle. The dimensions of the clinic; well, he had those. But he could not summon an account of his own emotions—not fright, something other than fright. The clinic was smoldering, he said to Sieglinde, and the scene before him seemed like a relic from the century before, an eternal tableau vivant. It was as if he were witnessing an event from history, something written about in books and puzzled upon—the fall of Carthage, the construction of the Great Wall of China. Hamlet’s soul. The headman looked through him as if he were made of glass, superfluous in any case. He had the idea that an invisible hand was in charge, a manifestation of fate itself, implacable, not to be denied, not to be understood most of all. This small corner of the world, he said to Sieglinde, was not my business. I felt I had no right to be there. I was an interference. My presence was an offense. More than an offense, a provocation. I had arrived unannounced and uninvited, as if I had every right to be there, almost an obligation—to open the door without knocking and be welcomed without question. My clinic, my
laissez-passer.
The bundle moved and I saw that it was a woman, at first I thought a child, and then I knew she was old. The headman carried her easily, as if she were weightless. Harry said to Sieglinde, And when the woman died at last, I took one step back. When the sergeant called to me from the boat, I could hear the fear in his voice, a kind of stutter, his desire to be quit of village life. I hesitated only a little while before walking away in order to leave them in peace, the last two inhabitants. They were lost as surely as if they had been in a death camp or on the
Titanic.
The headman remained still as stone on the top step of the clinic stairs, smoke misting around him. When I turned at last to go I saw four soldiers emerge from the clinic looking dazed. They were filthy and obviously disoriented and almost at