“Oh, of course,” scoffs Zan. “But you know, I convinced myself it was somehow no different than one of us being a Republican and the other a Democrat, and particularly since I was neither, I thought we just wouldn’t talk politics. What I didn’t know is that if you’re a Stalinist, there’s nothing that isn’t political.” Jenna literally was a card-carrying member of the Party even if Zan never saw the card; and he was so fraught to sleep with her that he went to a couple of meetings, where everyone was ancient, the median age well over seventy — so it became obvious what the Party saw in Jenna, which was the same thing Zan saw: a sexy young woman in her mid-twenties, putting a beautiful and glamorous face on the movement.
~ ~ ~
After that, it became difficult for Zan to take seriously certain national paranoias. The idea that these codgers were going to take over the country, that the country had to be on its guard against them every moment, was laughable, not only because they were feeble in body but because among them there wasn’t a single independent thought. If, for instance, in the course of one of Jenna’s monologues about fascism it was pointed out that Stalin and Hitler had a pact, Jenna denied it ever happened, insisting it was a creation of an elitist media — something Zan hears back home now, where no compass is consulted in common, where the designation of north is considered by some a state plot, where facts and information are the coordinates of suspect maps, where people who actually know things are the enemies of “common sense.” Soon sex with Jenna wasn’t worth it anymore, not least because sexual licentiousness was yet another myth about a doctrinaire Left that in fact regarded eroticism as decadence, a mass social opiate like religion. She was the single most repressed woman he ever knew.
~ ~ ~
What survived Zan’s affair with Jenna, at least for a while, was a friendship with her comrade if not lover Ronnie Jack. Perhaps the fact that neither man was sleeping with Jenna provided a bond. Then Zan got fired from the travel magazine for “insubordination” and being a “disruptive influence,” the last time until lately that he was considered by anyone as volatile, and which he took as a sign to finish what still could be called his most recent novel—“most recent!” Zan laughs to Brown. “That makes it sound, well, fucking recent, doesn’t it?” In the novel was a very small character, a few paragraphs in a single chapter, based on Ronnie. Zan changed a detail or two but not, as it turned out, enough, because when the book was published, someone in the insurance company where Ronnie worked read it and concluded that the black man working in his department was the Stalinist with a militant past in the Sixties — and Ronnie lost his job.
~ ~ ~
Zan pleads to Brown, “What are the odds? This was twenty years after all the Panther stuff, if that’s what it was, and this novel was read by, you know, a hundred and thirteen people on the planet, eighty-seven of them in Japan or some place — and one just happens to work in the same insurance company as Ronnie Jack Flowers? It was enough to make me believe in all their conspiracies after all. And what I didn’t understand in my white naïveté is that west of Connecticut there literally was a single black executive in the insurance business. If I just had left out the word ‘insurance,’ nothing would have happened. One detail too many. Mostly, though, I thought, Who cares? And of course that was the most naïve thing of all. Who cares anymore what anyone did in the Sixties? Isn’t half the workforce former radicals now paying into pension funds?”
~ ~ ~
Brown says, “Another vodka, then?”
“No,” says Zan.
“This story is somehow directed at me, I take it?”
“I’m not sure anymore,” Zan says sincerely, “but then I’m not finished. Let me finish and we’ll decide.”
“Lovely,” Brown shifts in his chair.
“There’s two points, really, one I was trying to make to Viv, whose culpability in the matter of whatever happened to the woman who may or may not be Zema’s mother—”
“Whose?”
“—Sheba’s mother is far less than mine in the whole Ronnie Jack Flowers affair, and that point is, Viv is responsible for doing what she can to make things right, but she can’t hold herself responsible for how things turn out, because we live in a world where sometimes the right thing is just not going to turn out. The other point has to do with Ronnie himself, who I saw being interviewed on a ‘news’ cable channel, if you can call this particular channel such a thing, while we were waiting in the airport to come to London and for Viv to go on to Ethiopia.”
~ ~ ~
Brown says, “He’s become a prominent figure, then.”
“Now,” Zan explains, “he’s vice-chairman or co-director for something called Civic Organizers Network, and his politics are as far to the right as they once were to the left. And here’s the thing — Ronnie hasn’t changed at all, as far as I can tell. Because the specific content of his views is beside the point. The point is the totalitarian pathology, the pathology of zealotry or, if you want to put it in more secular terms, ideology. Because what the zealot or ideologue really believes in is the zealous nature itself, the devout embrace of hard distinctions — the crusade against gray. It’s a story as old as the original novel, historical or not — the Damascan convert. The completely adamant non-believer who becomes the believer, and the thing that hasn’t altered an iota is his adamancy.”
“Not to mention that perhaps this chap’s politics were always as opportunistic as you suspected.”
“That’s not for me to say, and it takes me off the hook for nothing.”
“I think perhaps this story,” says Brown, “is less about my zealotry, as you’ve characterized it — that part, I assume, is directed at me — and more about why you haven’t written a novel since.”
“Touché,” says Zan, lifting to him the empty vodka glass. “I would drink to you if my glass weren’t empty.”
“I offered you another, didn’t I?” Brown points out. “And I assume this new novel you’re writing now,” he continues, gesturing in the direction of Zan’s daughter digging into her fish and chips, “is about a white man raising a black daughter at the same time a black bloke is president of his country?”
Zan is shocked. “Of course not.”
“Why not?”
“Because there are things about race that no white person can understand. Because no white author has the moral authority, not to mention insight or wisdom, to write such a book. Don’t be daft, as you Brits would say.”
~ ~ ~
They get to the station in time for the night’s last express back to London. On the platform the two men shake hands; Brown watches the nanny pull Sheba onto the train, Parker leading the way. “So it’s working out, then,” Brown says.
“I think so,” Zan answers. “In the back of her four-year-old little brain is always the question whether we’ll be one more family who sends her away. So everything’s a test, of course, to see if she can push us to do it.”