Upstairs, my mother and Kitty unpacked the linen. It had lain so long in the trunk that the folds seemed to have made permanent creases in the material, and the creases themselves had discoloured slightly, forming a grid-like pattern over everything we unfolded. But the silk-embroidered monograms were intact on every corner, shiny as the calm areas on ruffled water, and in spite of the poor state of the linen itself, my mother still seemed entirely satisfied with her idea.
She and Kitty spent the next day washing the linen and wringing it through the mangle. The following morning, when my father returned from New York, he found them ironing it in the kitchen.
It was evident that all was not well with him. Normally he was fastidious about his appearance, careful to keep his wavy black hair well combed, aspiring to a well-groomed anonymity in his dark suits, plain ties and clean white shirts. Even after his all-night flights back from New York he would look spruce and tidy, if a little tired. But this time there was a strange raggedness about him: his tie loose, his shirt dishevelled, his jacket crumpled as if he had used it for a pillow. Most unusually, he had not shaved at the airport. And there was a haggard look in his red-rimmed eyes as they roved around the pieces of linen draped all over the kitchen.
‘What’s this?’ he asked, turning up the corner of a tablecloth and examining the embroidered initials.
My mother told him, ‘I thought it might come in useful when we go to New York.’
‘Put it away. Get rid of it.’
It was extremely rare to hear him speak sharply to my mother. She retorted at once:
‘What’s the matter with you, Joseph? Didn’t you sleep on the plane?’
‘Kitty, leave us, would you?’
Kitty slipped out of the kitchen. My father waited till he heard her close the door of her room.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he asked my mother.
‘Joseph, please don’t speak to me in that manner.’
‘As if your family isn’t enough of a liability already, you have to go flaunting your ridiculous heirlooms in front of strangers…’ He waggled the embroidered corner at my mother. ‘Von Riesen… What do you think this is, the Hapsburg Empire? The court of King Ludwig? Are you crazy?’
‘I would hardly call Kitty a stranger.’
‘You have no idea who she talks to.’
My mother’s eyes gleamed dangerously. She asked in a tone of deadly self-controclass="underline"
‘Joseph, what is the matter? Did something happen in New York?’
‘No!’ he shouted. He seemed to quiver. And for a moment a look of fear crossed his tired, careworn face.
For my mother was right. Something had happened in New York. It appeared my father had made a blunder. What he had done, I learned later, was to have slightly overestimated his own licence to make concessions in the finer detail of an informal round of arms negotiation; a minute conciliatory gesture that he had believed himself empowered to offer, but which had been relayed to a member of the Soviet SALT II negotiating team stationed in Geneva and promptly aroused that personage’s imperial ire. On the diplomatic stage at that particular moment in history, when the two sides of the globe had worked themselves into an inflammable sweat of paranoid terror about each other’s intentions, the smallest things were charged with an exaggerated significance. There was the well-known incident of the Soviet official who forgot to remove his hat when he greeted President Nixon in Moscow for the signing of the SALT I treaty. The negligence was interpreted by the Americans as a deliberate affront, and the newspapers spent many days speculating on what precise grievance was being symbolically expressed. Given that this year, the year of my father’s blunder, happened to be the very year in which our state was prevailed upon to change its constitution, and proclaim itself ‘for ever and irrevocably allied’ with the Soviet Union, my father had good reason to be worried. History doesn’t relate what happened to the official who forgot to take off his hat, but there is little reason to believe that he was forgiven for his error.
At any rate, my father wasn’t. A few days after his return he was told that he had been removed from the UN team.
My father must have guessed that that was to be his last trip; in addition to the usual case of miniatures for bribing Herr Brandt, he had brought with him presents of an especially poignant ‘Americanness’: a raccoon-skin hat for my mother, a New Mexican turquoise pin for Kitty, a calculator for Otto, and for me a set of metal ballpoint pens, each in the shape of a famous American skyscraper. These joined the other knick-knacks and gadgets he had brought home on earlier trips, and because they were now part of a finite series, never to be further augmented, they acquired a hallowed quality in our household. They were the sacred relics of a brief, visionary connection with a reality larger than our own; one that had tragically eluded our grasp.
CHAPTER 2
So much for my family’s glorious ascent into the international political elite of New York.
To my mother’s credit, she never directly reproached my father, but the tragic aura she assumed from then on must have been a living reproach to him, and even if it wasn’t, he certainly subjected himself to enough reproach of his own. Quite a rapid change came over him: he continued to work hard (he was sent back to the Friendship Treaties, and the subsequent agreements on technology-sharing with other Warsaw Pact countries), but under what seemed a steadily thickening glaze of failure. He wasn’t the type to respond to criticism from his superiors with defiance or countercriticism. What he seemed to want were opportunities to show his loyalty and diligence, if not in order to be reinstated, then at least to be acknowledged as a faithful servant. At the same time, though, he had obviously lost his self-confidence, and with it the air of quiet capability that had once impressed people, so that even if his blunder had been forgiven, he was clearly no longer suitable for a high-level career in the diplomatic service. His appearance grew shabbier. He aged. There was something distracted and disconcertingly meek in the way he smiled.
As for my mother’s ‘tragic aura’, it was a complex thing; a hybrid, I believe, of real disappointment, and a kind of tactical reorganisation of her forces. There was humility in it – just enough to deflect the Schadenfreude or downright vengeful delight of her acquaintances, and to convert what had formerly been a rather too flagrant haughtiness into something more subtle and sombre and dignified. If she could no longer intimidate people by the suggestion of hidden powers in her possession, she could make them respect her out of consideration for the magnitude of our loss. She made a point of telling our friends and neighbours what had happened, always in a tone of sad but unselfpitying acceptance of our misfortune, thereby establishing the event in terms that were acceptable to her, and gaining control over people’s reactions to it.
It was at this time that the word ‘intellectual’ first entered her active vocabulary. Pretty soon it was joined by other, similar words, such as ‘cultural’ and ‘aesthetic’. ‘So and so is an intellectual fraud,’ she might be heard saying, or ‘So and so has no aesthetic sense whatsoever.’
At first these remarks had a tentative quality, like somebody trying out a new way of dressing and pretending not to be anxious about what others might think. But people seemed to accept them without protest, and the self-consciousness soon left her. Before long it was apparent that she had constructed a new hierarchy of values by which to organise the world in a manner that once again accorded with her invincible sense of our family’s worth. If we were not to take our place in the inner circle of the political elite, then so be it: we would dazzle and confound others from our eminence in the sphere of real merit, which was to say the sphere of culture and ideas and, above all, Art.