Kermin had resolved this, at least in part, by founding the Ravna Gora Broadcast News Network (RGBNN) when he was sixteen years old. Transmitting from his bedroom in Elizabeth, using a homebrewed radio setup, the RGBNN was a short-lived exercise in making right what was once wrong: it exclusively broadcast elaborate (and one must say, incoherent) anti-fascist manifestos that Kermin had penned himself. He would read these aloud over Luka’s old Serbian records.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are all equal rights,” young Kermin intoned into his microphone. “No one can tell us how to make difference from others. We are all made from same branches of trees. We are all human branches. Past is past, future is future, man is man, woman is woman.”
Any self-consciousness about the clumsiness of these sermons was mitigated by the knowledge that no one was listening to his frequency, and even if they were, they certainly wouldn’t know who was speaking. At least this was what he had assumed.
• • •
“YOU ARE JOKING ME,” Kermin said to Leif, shaking his head. “Truly — how did you find out? No one knows this.”
“You know what your problem is, Kermin?” said Leif, smiling. “You keep wanting us to be different, but the more you get to know me, the more you realize that we are exactly the same.”
They walked in silence. The light in the sky had grown soft and casual, like the back of a hand. The drumming popped lightly through Kermin’s radio.
Leif stopped. “Tell me, Kermin, are you familiar with Heinrich von Kleist?”
“No.”
“Kleist wrote an essay called ‘On the Marionette Theatre.’ Not an essay, really — more of a dialogue. . in the Socratic tradition. You know Socrates, yes?”
Kermin shook his head. “Not personally.”
Leif laughed out loud. “That is a good one. ‘Not personally.’ I must remember that one.”
Kermin smiled at his unintentional humor. For just an instant, he felt like the smartest man alive.
“Well, I don’t know Socrates personally, either,” said Leif. “Nor Kleist. But in his essay, two men discuss puppetry, which at the time was seen as a petty craft, performed by unskilled peasants for children and criminals. In many ways, not that different from how it is perceived today, yes?”
“Puppets?” said Kermin. “Like Pinocchio?”
“You see? You think of puppets and you immediately think of children. You have been corrupted by a lack of imagination. Kleist’s essay addresses this exact problem. . In his piece, one of the men proposes that the puppet, without any awareness of self, is more graceful, more true, in the Kantian sense, than any human actor can possibly be. This astonishes his partner, who, like you, has never before considered the puppet as anything but a child’s toy. But here, then, is the problem: a human cannot move without also observing his own movement, and in observing it, he corrupts it. A puppet doesn’t suffer from this same condition. It’s free to inhabit only the movement asked of it, nothing more, and in doing so, the puppet tempts perfection — and, indeed, God himself.”
“Without observation, there is no life.”
“But how do you know? This is an assumption on your part, yes?”
Kermin turned off his radio. “You are a crazy man.”
“No, Kermin, I’m a puppeteer. There’s a difference,” said Leif. “Come, I want to show you something.”
They walked down some steps, through a gate, and to the door of a large house that Kermin had not seen before. Leif paused with his hand on the doorknob.
“Don’t be alarmed by what you’re about to see,” he said. “Your life will never be in danger. Do you trust me?”
“No.”
“Fine. Probably better this way,” said Leif and opened the door.
The entire house was one large room, with high ceilings and a dimly lit stage at its center, surrounded by several rows of empty chairs. In the middle of the stage stood a bear, perhaps nine feet tall. At first Kermin thought the bear was merely a taxidermied statue, but then he saw its head twist and one of its paws shudder and he realized the thing was alive. He took a step back against the wall.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Leif. “We’ve controlled Gunnar thoroughly. He only knows his task.”
“He is real bear?”
“As real as you or I,” said Leif. “Now I want you to fight him.”
“Jesi lud.”
“I assure you, there’s no danger. Gunnar will never fight back; he has been trained only to defend.” Leif picked up what looked like a fencer’s rapier. “The point is not sharp, so have no fear about injuring the creature. Your only objective is to try and tap the pendant attached to the bear’s chest. If you do this, the alarm will chime and the fight will be over.”
“I’m not fighting a bear. He will kill me.”
“The bear won’t kill you. The bear cannot kill you. For this I give you my word. The only person who can defeat you is you.”
“I don’t take your word.”
“All right, then. We stand at an impasse,” said Leif. “If you don’t believe another man’s word, then what do you believe?”
The question caught Kermin off guard. He had come to Norway hoping that the trip alone would cure his wife of the strange sickness that continued to consume her. He did not know what had gone wrong between them; he could not point to a piece of their life and say, “This is the part that is broken.” He knew only that at some point, during some brief, quiet moment when he had not been paying attention, they had drifted off course, and they were now in uncharted waters. Kermin never claimed to know much in this world, but he did know that he must never lose Charlene, that without her he would never be whole again. And so he had tried to come to this place with an open mind, even if he knew in his heart that he had relinquished some vital part of himself by even setting foot here. Maybe this was what love had become: the slow act of giving up more and more until nothing of yourself remained. Yet when Leif had described the procedure to treat their son, something inside of him had snapped and recoiled — not because he believed the procedure wouldn’t work or that Radar might be harmed, but because he knew that there was a very real possibility that it would work, and that afterwards, nothing could ever be the same.
Through the shadows of the room, Kermin looked at the bear, who had not moved since their arrival, save for bobbing his head back and forth ever so slightly, giving him an air of reluctant wisdom.
Again the lantern of memory was lit, and Kermin was suddenly taken with a forgotten scene from his past: Once, when he was very young, he was walking through the woods alone, gathering white currants into a thrush basket for his mother’s preserves. He had not told his mother where he was going, because he knew she would never have let him go. The war had already been raging for two years, and she had forbidden him to wander, but he had wanted to surprise her with the basketful of currants, to make her smile again, just like she had done before his father left to go fight in the hills. Together they would dip the jars into the boiling water, mash up the berries, and make her famous preserves.
But somewhere along the way, Kermin had gotten lost. Scared and feeling feverish, he had stumbled into an unfamiliar clearing, and there, sitting in the sunlight, working at one of his paws, was a floppy-skinned brown bear. Kermin’s first thought was that it must be a man in a bear costume, for the bear’s gentle sentience was much too close to his own. And then the bear, startled by his sudden entrance, leaped to its feet and took several tumbling steps toward him. Kermin froze, not daring to move, his basket of currants trembling at his side. He could hear the bear’s ragged breath coming in snorts and sniffles. He realized that the creature was trying to smell him, trying to understand what kind of thing he was.