“I see. So what’s it all about?”
“The nanny?”
“Viv in Africa.”
Zan looks at Sheba, out of earshot. “Her mother,” he answers, nodding at the girl. “I mean her birth-mother.”
“I thought she was an orphan.”
“Well, James, orphans have mothers. They’re just not mothers who are in the picture anymore.”
Brown says, “But this one is in the picture now, I take it?”
“It’s not that she’s in the picture,” says Zan, “it’s the way she’s not in the picture.”
Brown shakes his head and shrugs.
“We’ve been trying to find out about the mother for a while.” Zan glances back at the girl. “Someday she’ll want to know. She’ll be angry if we never tried to find out. She’ll be angry at us anyway about one thing or another, about all kinds of things, but this one she’ll have a right to be angry about. A couple of months ago Viv got a journalist in Addis on the trail, he asked some questions, and now there are these. . well, they’re not even reports, they’re too undefined to be reports, they’re rumors. . or what have you. . that this journalist Viv hired was getting close to some discovery about the mother and, in asking all kinds of questions, something happened to her. She’s in jail. She’s in hiding. She’s fled the country. She’s dead.” He looks at Molly. “Listen, what do you know about—?”
“Another drink?” asks Brown.
Zan realizes he’s downed the one hand he has. “O.K.,” he says, pulling some money from his pocket, “let me—”
“Don’t be bloody silly.” The Englishman gets up to get another drink. Zan continues watching Molly and Sheba, calls over the waitress and orders fish and chips for the kids. When Brown returns, Zan says, “The kids like your fish and chips.”
“Hmm,” says Brown.
“Thanks for the drink,” says Zan.
~ ~ ~
Fortified, not that Brown necessarily needs it but he supposes Zan does, the Englishman says, “The flaw with your lecture, of course. . ” He pauses to see how this beginning registers; Zan raises an eyebrow and Brown continues, “. . the flaw is that it presumes there’s a history at all, doesn’t it? I mean the whole original business, Jesus and God and all that. Hardly the stuff of history, is it?”
“How do we know?” says Zan.
“But you don’t mean you believe in God?” says Brown.
Zan makes a show of pondering this as though he never has before. “Fifty-one days out of a hundred.”
“What kind of faith is that?”
“The best I can manage. Whether anyone calls it faith or not, I don’t much care.”
“But why bother to believe at all?”
“Because it’s not a matter of whether I can be bothered, it’s a matter of what I do. Believe, I mean.”
“Are you certain?” Brown says. “I mean, people who believe do so because they rather want or need to, don’t they?”
“Well, a lot do. Maybe most. But no more so than those who don’t believe.”
“How’s that?”
“Not believing because you need not to, no less so than the person who does.”
~ ~ ~
Brown shakes his head. “Not following.”
“Sure you are.” Everyone picks arguments with me these days! thinks Zan.
“I don’t believe because there’s no intelligent reason to.”
“Horseshit.”
“You’ve become rather more forceful than when I used to know you, Alexander. Rather more talkative.”
“So everyone tells me lately. Maybe I always think I’m on the radio.”
“Or the vodka perhaps.”
“Probably.”
“But that doesn’t mean that what you say makes more sense, does it?”
“Listen, if you’re being purely rational about it, then agnosticism is the only stance that has any logic to it. The atheist is just another kind of zealot. You’re zealous in your non-belief but the zealotry is no different from the zealotry of faith.”
“But how can you believe in God?”
“Fifty-one days out of a hundred. . ”
“Explain to me one day out of a hundred.”
“Who cares?”
“Meaning you can’t answer, can you?”
“Meaning do you care.”
“I’m positively riveted.”
“Because it makes more sense to me,” says Zan.
“God makes more sense?”
~ ~ ~
Zan explains, or tries to, and Brown does him the courtesy of appearing to be absorbed if in no way persuaded. “Right, then,” he says, with a small gesture of his hand, “so why not a hundred days out of a hundred?”
“I’m scandinavian,” Zan explains. “We don’t do joy.”
~ ~ ~
On his third vodka Zan muses out loud, “Ronnie Jack Flowers.”
Brown makes that little gesture with his hand again. “Don’t know him.”
“I knew him,” Zan says, “twenty, twenty-five years—”
“Are you all right?” Brown interjects.
“Why? Don’t I seem all right?”
“Oh, certainly.”
“Do I seem drunk?”
“Not necessarily. But then I’m not sure I would know, would I? With you, I mean.”
“Twenty, twenty-five years ago. . ”
“Ronnie Joe. . ”
“Ronnie Jack. Black, hard-left politically. Radical politics in the Sixties, militant. . ”
“Panthers, then.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. But armed resistance, anyway, up against the wall, all that. I think I am a bit drunk.” Zan holds his head a moment. Because he’s prone to migraines, it’s normal that with the first sip of liquor his head begins throbbing. “But when I knew him, like everyone in the Eighties, he had left the Sixties behind.”
~ ~ ~
It was a common story in the Eighties, of course — former Sixties radicals in the mainstream, doing well. Ronnie Jack loved the best clothes, the best cars, the best stereo equipment, good food, beautiful women — the Stalinist from Esquire, still talking left “and I mean left,” says Zan, “I don’t mean New Left, I mean Marxist-Leninist left,” which seemed quaint even with the Cold War still going on. Ronnie Jack took the good-will trips to the Soviet Union and considered the people there to “have it pretty good,” in his words; and if, as Zan did once or twice, the contradiction was noted between Ronnie’s politics and the high life he lived, Ronnie would answer, I just think everyone should have the best clothes and best cars and best stereo equipment and beautiful women.
Zan and Ronnie Jack worked in the same building, where the former wrote for a travel magazine and the latter was in the public relations department of an insurance firm. They met through Jenna, a Stalinist that Zan was dating and with whom Ronnie Jack — more the ladies’ man than Zan ever was — had gotten nowhere. “Wait,” Brown says now, “you were dating a Stalinist?”
~ ~ ~
What can Zan say? She was a hot Stalinist. Brown hair, brown eyes, the smile and body of an italian starlet. “But didn’t the fact,” says Brown, “that she was a Stalinist. .?”