Breytenbach or Oz, someone like that, said that the state had no imagination, Dad said that on the contrary, not only did it have an imagination, it also had a sense of humor, and he would give an example of a joke by the state, and then he told the story of the letter that had not been censored, and I sat there in the audience feeling so proud because everybody laughed and after all I was the one who opened the letter. I went with him to every session, are you kidding?, I was crazy for writers, I’d been a writer’s daughter all my life and books to me were like the greatest thing, and it was so cool because they let me sit in on everything even though I was only small. It was so great to see my dad finally with his like peers and getting so much respect, and besides, here were all these names walking around attached to the real people they belonged to, Donald Barthelme, Gunter Grass, Czeslaw Milosz, Grace Paley, John Updike, everyone. But at the end my father had that look on his face, the one like the one on yours, and he left me with Aunt Kitty from Chelsea, not my real aunt, she and Dad had a thing for about five minutes—you should have seen him with women, he was this big sexy guy with huge hands and a thick mustache like I guess Stalin, and he would look women in the eye and start talking about animals in heat, wolves, for instance, and that was it, they were gone. I swear to God these ladies would actually make a line, he’d go up to his hotel room and they’d form right up outside, a real honest to goodness line, the greatest women you can imagine, just weak at the knees with lust; and it’s lucky I liked to read a lot, and also there was American TV to watch for once, so I was okay in the other room, I was fine, though a lot of times I wanted to go out and ask those women waiting around for it to be their turn, like, don’t you have something better to do, you know?, it’s only his pecker for Chrissakes, get a life. Yeah, I used to shock a lot of people, I grew up fast I guess because it was always my dad and me, always him and me against the world. So anyway I guess he liked Aunt Kitty, she must’ve passed the audition, because her prize was she got to look after me for two weeks while Dad went off with two professors to walk in I think the Appalachians; hill walking was what he liked to do to get rid of his people overdoses, and he always came back looking different, kind of clearer, you know? I called it his Moses look. Down from the mountain, you know, with the Decalogue. Only in Dad’s case, usually, poetry. Anyhow, long story short, about five minutes after he got back from schmoozing with the profs on a mountainside, he was offered a post at Columbia University and we moved to New York permanently. Which I loved, sure, but he was like I said a country person and a dyed-in-the-wool European person, too, so it was harder for him. Still, he was used to working with what there was, used to handling whatever life sent his way. Okay, he drank like a real Yugoslav and he smoked about a hundred a day and he had a bad heart, he knew he was never going to be an old man, but he had made a decision about his life. You know, like in The Nigger of the Narcissus. I must live until I die. And that’s what he did, he did great work and had great sex and smoked great cigarettes and drank great liquor and then the damn war started and out of nowhere he turned into this person I didn’t know, this, I guess, Serb. Listen, he despised the guy he called the other Milosevic, he hated having the same name, and that’s really why he changed it, if you want the truth. To separate Milo the poet from Milosevic the fascist gangster pig. But after it all went crazy out there in getting-to-be-ex-Yugo, he got all worked up about the demonization of the Serbs, even though he agreed with most of the analysis of what Milosevic was doing in Croatia and going to do in Bosnia, his heart was just inflamed by the anti-Serb stuff, and in some mad moment he decided it was his duty to go back and be the moral conscience of the place, you know, like Stephen Dedalus, to forge in the smithy of his soul et cetera et cetera or some Serb Solzhenitsyn. I told him to cut it out, who was Solzhenitsyn anyway but this crazy old coot in Vermont dreaming of being a prophet back in Mother Russia, but when he got home nobody was listening to his same old song, that’s definitely not the route you want to go, Dad, for you it’s women and cigarettes and booze and mountains and work work work, the idea was to let that stuff kill you, right, the plan was to stay away from Milosevic and his killers, not to mention bombs. But he didn’t listen to me, and instead of sticking to the game plan he caught a plane back there, into the fury. That’s what I started out to say, Professor, don’t talk to me about fury, I know what it can do. America, because of its omnipotence, is full of fear; it fears the fury of the world and renames it envy, or so my dad used to say. They think we want to be them, he’d say after a few hits of hooch, but really we’re just mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore. See, he knew about fury. But then he set aside what he knew and behaved like a damn fool. Because about five minutes after he landed in Belgrade or maybe it was five hours or five days or five weeks, who, like, cares?—the fury blew him to pieces and there wasn’t enough of him found to collect up and put in a box. So, yeah, Professor, and you’re mad about a doll. Well, excuse me.”
The weather had changed. The heat of early summer had given way to a disturbed, patternless time. There were many clouds and too much rain, and days of morning heat that abruptly turned cold after lunch, sending shivers through the girls in their summer dresses and the bare-torsoed roller-bladers in the park, with those mysterious leather belts strapped tightly across their chests, like self-imposed penances, just below their pectoral muscles. In the faces of his fellow citizens Professor Solanka discerned new bewilderments; the things on which they had relied, summery summers, cheap gasoline, the pitching arms of David Cone and yes, even Orlando Hernandez, these things had begun to let them down. A Concorde crashed in France, and people imagined they saw a part of their own dreams of the future, the future in which they too would break through the barriers that held them back, the imaginary future of their own limitlessness, going up in those awful flames.
This golden age, too, must end, Solanka thought, as do all such periods in the human chronicle. Maybe this truth was just beginning to slide into people’s consciousness, like the drizzle trickling down inside the upturned collars of their raincoats, like a dagger slipping through the gaps in their armor-plated confidence. In an election year, America’s confidence was political currency. Its existence could not be denied; the incumbents took credit for it, their opponents refused them that credit, calling the boom an act of God or else of Alan Greenspan of the Federal Reserve. But our nature is our nature and uncertainty is at the heart of what we are, uncertainty per se, in and of itself, the sense that nothing.is written in stone, everything crumbles. As Marx was probably still saying out there in the junkyard of ideas, the intellectual St. Helena to which he had been exiled, all that is solid melts into air. In a public climate of such daily-trumpeted assurance, where did our fears go to hide? On what did they feed? On ourselves, perhaps, Solanka thought. While the greenback was all-powerful and America bestrode the world, psychological disorders and aberrations of all sorts were having a field day back home. Under the self-satisfied rhetoric of this repackaged, homogenized America, this America with the twenty-two million new jobs and the highest home-owning rate in history, this balanced-budget, low-deficit, stock-owning Mall America, people were stressed-out, cracking up, and talking about it all day long in superstrings of moronic cliché. Among the young, the inheritors of plenty, the problem was most acute. Mila, with her ultra-precocious Parisian upbringing, often referred scornfully to the confusion of her contemporaries. Everybody was scared, she said, everybody she knew, however good their facade, was quaking inside, and it didn’t make any difference that everybody was rich. Between the sexes the trouble was worst of all. “Guys don’t really know how or when or where to touch girls anymore, and girls can barely tell the difference between desire and assault, flirtation and offensiveness, love and sexual abuse.” When everything and everyone you touch turns instantly to gold, as King Midas learned in the other classic be-careful-what-you-wish-for fable, you end up not being able to touch anything, or anyone, at all.