“No strategy on earth could have defeated Erwin Rommel,” Wyndam-Matson said. “And no events like this guy dreamed up, this town in Russia very heroically called ‘Stalingrad,’ no holding action could have done any more than delay the outcome; it couldn’t have changed it. Listen. I met Rommel. In New York, when I was there on business, in 1948.” Actually, he had only seen the Military Governor of the U.S.A. At a reception in the White House, and at a distance. “What a man. What dignity and bearing. So I know what I’m talking about,” he wound up.
“It was a dreadful thing,” Rita said, “when General Rommel was relieved of his post and that awful Lammers was appointed in his place. That’s when that murdering and those concentration camps really began.”
“They existed when Rommel was Military Governor.”
“But—” She gestured. “It wasn’t official. Maybe those SS hoodlums did those acts then… but he wasn’t like the rest of them; he was more like those old Prussians. He was harsh—”
“I’ll tell you who really did a good job in the U.S.A.,” Wyndam-Matson said, “who you can look to for the economic revival. Albert Speer. Not Rommel and not the Organization Todt. Speer was the best appointment the Partei made in North America; he got all those businesses and corporations and factories—everything!—going again, and on an efficient basis. I wish we had that out here—as it is, we’ve got five outfits competing in each field, and at terrific waste. There’s nothing more foolish than economic competition.”
Rita said, “I couldn’t live in those work camps, those dorms they have back East. A girl friend of mine; she lived there. They censored her mail—she couldn’t tell me about it until she moved back out here again. They had to get up at six-thirty in the morning to band music.”
“You’d get used to it. You’d have clean quarters, adequate food, recreation, medical care provided. What do you want? Egg in your beer?”
Through the cool night fog of San Francisco, his big German-made car moved quietly.
On the floor Mr. Tagomi sat, his legs folded beneath him. He held a handleless cup of oolong tea, into which he blew now and then as he smiled up at Mr. Baynes.
“You have a lovely place here,” Baynes said presently. “There is a peacefulness here on the Pacific Coast. It is completely different from—back there.” He did not specify.
“ ‘God speaks to man in the sign of the Arousing.’ “ Mr. Tagomi murmured.
“Pardon?”
“The oracle. I’m sorry. Fleece-seeking cortical response.”
Woolgathering, Baynes thought. That’s the idiom he means. To himself he smiled.
“We are absurd,” Mr. Tagomi said, “because we live by a five-thousand-year-old book. We set it questions as if it were alive. It is alive. As is the Christian Bible; many books are actually alive. Not in metaphoric fashion. Spirit animates it. Do you see?” He inspected Mr. Baynes’ face for his reaction.
Carefully phrasing his words, Baynes said, “I just don’t know enough about religion. It’s out of my field. I prefer to stick to subjects I have some competence in.” As a matter of fact, he was not certain what Mr. Tagomi was talking about. I must be tired, Mr. Baynes thought. There has been, since I got here this evening, a sort of… gnomish quality about everything. A smaller-than-life quality, with a dash of the droll. What is this five-thousand-year-old book? The Mickey Mouse watch, Mr. Tagomi himself, the fragile cup in Mr. Tagomi’s hand… and, on the wall facing Mr. Baynes, an enormous buffalo head, ugly and menacing.
“What is that head?” he asked suddenly.
“That,” Mr. Tagomi said, “is nothing less than creature which sustained the aboriginal in bygone days.”