Rosamund said, "My guess is that being seen in public with you was worth a lot to Grielescu. But this is how you do things, Chick: the observations you make crowd out the main point."
"That's exactly what Ravelstein eventually told me. And how curious it was that I let myself be used like that."
"You wanted to please your wife. You wanted her good opinion. And Ravelstein probably felt that you were letting yourself be conned. Taking the easy way out..
"I suppose I said to myself that this was some Frenchy-Balkan absurdity. Somehow I couldn't take Balkan fascists seriously. When the check came, Radu sprang out of his chair to grab it. It became a game that I never once get the tab. And one of the things that got me was how he always paid with clean, unwrinkled, fresh-from-the-bank currency, and he never seemed to look at the amount of the bill. If you grew up in the Depression, you wouldn't miss such a thing."
"And you entertained Ravelstein with your descriptions."
"I tried to. But he waved away the pipes and mannerisms. He was waiting for me to come out of the fog."
"Well, you were his appointed biographer. That you were slow on the uptake couldn't have pleased him."
"Of course not. When he told me that Radu's invitation to Jerusalem had been canceled I didn't even ask for the particulars. I see that I missed the boat."
"Well, when he chose you to write about him he didn't think you had no faults," said Rosamund.
"About the basics we agreed as closely as we could, considering my ignorance," I told her. "He had the support of the classics. I certainly did not, but when I was wrong I didn't put my energy where my errors were. I learned later in life how foolish it was to insist that you had been right."
"You needed to be right and you couldn't get by and be right, also," said Rosamund.
"Vela's plan was that Grielescu should replace Ravelstein. In Paris, when Abe rushed into our room and surprised her in her slip, she ran for the bathroom-she had a strange way of running, hippity-hop on her tiptoes-and she locked the door. Then the time came when she told me we couldn't see Ravelstein anymore."
"That was very odd," said Rosamund. In speaking of Vela she was always proper and circumspect. "Was this when Vela sent for her mother? Did she bring her to Paris?"
"No, no. The old girl had died a couple years before this. Your hunch is right, though. She relied on her mother to cover the-what should I call them-the human relations. She had no such skills herself. Anyway, the old girl loathed me. Having a Jewish son-in-law poisoned her old age."
"Now you've put your finger on the real subject," said Rosamund.
"You've given lots of thought to all kinds of problems, except the most important one. You began with the Jewish question," she said.
"Of course that's what this conversation is circling-what it means to the Jews that so many others, millions of others, willed their death. The rest of humankind expelled them. Hitler was on record as having said that once he was in power he would have gal lows, in rows, put up at the Marienplatz in Munich and the Jews, to the last Jew, would be hung there. It was the Jews that were Hitler's ticket to power. He didn't have, nor did he need, any other program. He became Chancellor by uniting Germany and much of the rest of Europe against the Jews. Anyway, insofar as this relates to Grielescu, I don't think he was a malevolent Jew-hater, but when he was called upon to declare himself, he declared himself. He had a vote and he voted. As Ravelstein saw it I refused to do the unpleasant work of thinking it all through."
"You didn't know where to begin?"
"Well, I had a Jewish life to lead in the American language, and that's not a language that's helpful with dark thoughts."
"Did you ever talk to Ravelstein about this power of viciousness?"
"I may have. Abe's character was far more cheerful than mine-a wide-open broad-daylight outlook. He was more like a normal person. But also he was anything but innocent."
"I did Thucydides with him," said Rosamund. "And I can re member what he had to say about the plague in Athens and the dumping of dead parents or sisters on the funeral pyres of strangers. But as for linking this with the masses of dead in the twentieth century-that wasn't something he did in class. Can you remember anything he might have said?"
"How do you suppose," I asked Rosamund, "that a man like Ravelstein might match up his existence-his daily awareness that he is dying-with the fact that his attention now is drawn to the many millions who were destroyed in this century. I am not thinking here of the fighting men or of peasants, kulaks, bourgeois, or party members or those designated as people eligible for forced labor, for death in the Gulags or fascist concentration camps-people easy to round up and send away in cattle cars. These would not normally have attracted Ravelstein's attention. They were the usual 'losers,' people whom governments had no reason to be concerned with-what somebody called a 'quicksand society' which sucked its victims down and drowned or suffocated them. The shortest way with such people was to get rid of them, turn them into corpses. There were also the Jews who had lost the right to exist and were told as much by their executioners-'There is no reason why you should not die.' And so from the Gulag in Russian Asia to the Atlantic Coast, there was a record of destruction or something like a death-disseminating anarchy. You had to think of these hundreds of thousands of mil lions destroyed on ideological grounds-that is, with some pretext of rationality. A rationale had considerable value as a manifestation of order or firmness of purpose. But the maddest forms of nihilism are the most strict German military ones. According to Davarr, who was a very great analyst, German militarism produced the extremest and most horrible nihilism. For the rank-and-file this led to the bloodiest and craziest kind of _revanchist__ murderous zeal. Because it was implicit in carrying out orders that all responsibility went back to the top, the source of all orders. And everybody was thus absolved. They were crazies through and through. And this was the Wehrmacht way of getting around responsibility for their crimes. Suppose there were civilian methods to attenuate guilty conduct, Ravelstein told me. Adding, 'But here I'm talking through my hat.' On all topics he had firm views but toward the end, when he referred obliquely to his condition he was more often sad than ironic, wasn't he, Rosie?"
"He wouldn't let himself sink into sadness for long, either."
"Well, but there was a general willingness to live with the destruction of millions. It was like the mood of the century to accept it. In combat you were covered by the special allowances made for soldiers. But I'm thinking of the great death populations of the Gulags and the German labor camps. Why does the century-I don't know how else to put it-underwrite so much destruction? There is a lameness that comes over all of us when we consider these facts."
I date this particular conversation about two years after Ravelstein's death. After the Guillain-Barrй he had worked very hard at walking and recovering the use of his hands. He knew that he had to surrender, to decline but he did it selectively. It didn't matter that he was unable to operate the coffee grinder, but he did need his hand skills for shaving, writing notes, dressing, smoking, signing checks. Few fail to recognize that if you don't apply yourself to recovery you're a basket case, a goner. On the morning of the day when he and I had come upon the parrot-filled holly bushes where the birds were feeding on red berries and scattering the snow, the hospital bed with the steel triangle was being dismantled and removed from Ravelstein's bedroom. "Thanks be to Somebody," he had said when it sank from sight in the freight elevator. "I never want to see that bosun's rig again."