“But you seemed … close to Anzor,” she protests, remembering the reception.
“Well, what do you expect?” Katrina retorts. “I was supposed to watch him. Besides … to tell you the truth, I sort of liked Anzor. Before he got mixed up with that really odious gang.”
“You liked him.”
“Well, didn’t you?” Katrina asks, in her impish lilt.
“But you knew what he was up to.”
“Oh, don’t get me wrong. I disliked him too, especially when he took up with those … gangsters. Believe me, I disapprove. I’m going to do everything in my power to help wipe them out.”
“Now you frighten me.”
“It’s not a polite game,” Katrina says tersely. “But you know, Anzor was one of our elusives. Very hard to make out. His
allegiances—well, shall we say they shifted. By which I don’t mean he was an opportunist. I mean the opposite, really. He was a sort of … idealist. He followed his ideas. His beliefs. He was highly intelligent, our Anzorichka, but also very stupid.”
“He didn’t seem stupid to me,” Isabel says, helplessly.
“He was stupid with ideas,” Katrina says. “A kind of moral idiot. You can read Dostoevsky, we have our very own tradition of these loonies. You know, madness is most dangerous when it’s rational. There’s this visceral madness, the kind you recognize from their eyes, where they go unhinged and out of control. But that kind of madness is … feeble. They don’t know what they want, so they’re prey to anyone who comes along and takes them in hand and gives them a Kalashnikov or an explosive belt to strap themselves to. They feel just great, being sent on a mission. They’re the ones who get used as fodder by the big guys, the ones who think they have a grand strategy.” She sighs. “You know, I’ve seen quite a few of them by now, I can tell the various types—”
“But Anzor—” Isabel interjects.
“Oh, Anzor was one of the
intelligents
,” Katrina answers, and launches into her flow of explanation again. “That was what made him so susceptible. You know, there’s no one like an intellectual to become fanatical with ideas. They think there’s nothing outside them. Anzor … he wasn’t deranged, just deluded. He got fooled by his beliefs. He was a purist, that was his problem.” She has been sounding very impassioned, by Katrina standards. “Once he fell for this stuff … I mean, I can understand how you fell for him. I know these characters, they become kind of … incandescent with conviction. And ice cold with it, too. After a while, there is no human scale of feeling.”
“But he seemed—”
“Oh seemed. It’s such an old story. We’re idiots too, we just lap this stuff up, the man looking into the middle distance and seeing the Cause. It’s so romantic, so … charismatic. Especially
if you live in a nice democratic country where nothing much happens. It’s very exciting. But you know what, these guys are actually not very exciting. Or interesting. I mean, maybe your Anzor was an exception, but for the most part … They’re fanatics, but they’re also boys with toys. It’s easy for them now, that’s the problem. They get upset about something, they get some ideas, and bingo, the Kalashnikovs are right there, or something worse. There’s nothing to it, that’s the problem. They get very drunk, or they pray a lot, or somebody gives them drugs, and they think they’re going to change the world. By blowing it up, of course, because what other kind of revolution is there. Bring down Mother Russia. Or the Wicked West. Or whoever they happen to hate. It’s easy. Much too easy.”
Isabel realizes that something has been out of kilter while they’ve talked. “Why are you speaking about Anzor in the past tense?” she asks.
There is an audible sigh on the other end of the receiver. “We’ve lost track of him,” Katrina says. “Which is really too bad.”
“Do you think …” Isabel begins.
“Possibly,” Katrina answers. “You know, they do more of those suicide missions these days. The heroes.” She pronounces the last word with definitive sarcasm. “Sometimes we don’t know exactly … who was involved.”
They don’t speak for a moment. “Anyway, darling, you should take care of yourself, all right?” Katrina says, and there is no irony in her voice this time. Her tone is almost maternal, but then, she is the older one in this conversation, the one who has known for a long time that the world is murky and impure, and that behind its facades there is no beyond, only more shadowy links, more conflict, more of the same.
“Are you going to try to find him?” Isabel asks tonelessly.
“Sure,” Katrina says. “But we may not.” She sighs again. “Anyway, this is not a reason for mourning. Or for feeling sorry.
He knew exactly what he was doing. It’s the others … the ones who get blown up for no good reason. There’re too many of them. Too many.”
It’s easy, that’s the revelation she has to contend with. She’s driving on automatic, hardly paying attention to where she’s going. By the time they decide to pull the trigger or the switch, or detonate the device, or throw it, there is nothing to it, except performing the maneuver deftly and hoping to escape under the cover of the big brute noise. Or in some cases, to vanish in it.
“You just don’t get it,” Larry had said to her, in another epoch. “You don’t get it.”
Now it all seems connected, the things she didn’t get. She didn’t get how
uncomplicated
the world is, how simple human purposes, how transparent. How most things are put together from component parts, like the bombs that Anzor or his buddies may be putting together right now. Constructing. Deconstructing. No vatic spirit interfused with things. Only a few Ideas, bestriding the world like ancient beasts, like clumsy mastodons. Only the doing and undoing. She remembers Anzor’s long, mobile fingers, his easily ignited pride. But she now knows: it doesn’t matter who Anzor is, or was, or what sort of character he has. Or had. Character: another word from another era. Anzor’s easily kindled sensitivities, the way he traveled the gradient from loyalty to hate … Irrelevant. Character melts at a certain degree of heat, or extremity. His hate would have been as finite as his love without the detonating devices in his hands. He might have kicked in the door, gotten drunk at the local pub. Might have raised his fist too violently at the football match. Without his devices and his Beliefs. It is those that augment rage to the nth power. She thinks of the man in the kaffiyeh and his hand on Anzor’s shoulder, summoning him, sealing a compact. That was what really mattered, the serious
thing; the gesture which left the imprint, which prepared Anzor for his deeds. He was readying himself to become an instrument, pure and streamlined. No interferences allowed. In such a state, detonating the device would have been logical. Easy. A simple QED. The mauled bodies, the fragmented limbs—a necessary result. A little deconstruction wreaked in the flesh. Probably, Anzor never imagined that part. But then, he didn’t need to. He had his iron-clad reasons. Killing the enemy: it’s a very old business, the oldest profession. We’re in the business of life and death, she thinks; we’ve always been in it, and it is such a finite proposition. You live once, you die once. Amid collective carnage, that, at least, is a consolation. At least death cannot be augmented beyond itself. She steps hard on the pedal as the traffic begins to move. There is no vastness into which the smoke of Anzor’s sacrifice ascended, nothing beyond the asphalt of the highway and the smoggy air. Nothing to take her beyond the flatness of the world, its bitter banality.
Then it is McElvoy himself on the phone. “I feel awful about what happened,” he says, after the throat-clearing preliminaries. “Even though I had no way of knowing that anything would happen, of course. I was an unwitting agent of events.”
“But you knew Anzor,” she states.
“Oh not well, not well.”
“Not well enough to warn me, I suppose,” she says, and some resentment steals into her voice.
“I’m not sure that would have been appropriate,” McElvoy asserts firmly. “It was all pretty haphazard. Our meeting, your meeting with him. I didn’t want to overinterpret. This was below the radar. Not the kind of thing we can figure into our equations.” He pauses, before going on. “Anyway, frankly, I couldn’t have predicted that you would—”
“Yes, I know,” she interrupts drily. “I suppose I couldn’t have
predicted it myself.” Despite everything, she feels a sort of regret at how altered she must seem in his eyes, how tarnished her image. She wonders what will happen to his admiration for her, whether he’ll still listen to her CDs.
“Well, maybe I should have been more prudent. Or more prescient,” McElvoy concedes soothingly. He’s letting her off the hook by suggesting the errors have been partly his. “I suppose I should have taken his passion for music into account.”
“In the equations.”
“We need to make our calculations more sensitive, that’s for sure. Not that they can ever be completely reliable. There are limits to our control over events, I’m afraid.” He sighs again. “Are you all right, though? This must have been a shock.”
“Yes. It was a shock.”
“I’m just sorry we didn’t catch on to how deep he was in this new Chechen stuff,” McElvoy is saying. “If we had known, I’d have warned you, of course. I’d have come to Sofia, or Brussels, if necessary.”
“So it was all just a bunch of coincidences,” she says.
“Pretty much,” McElvoy confirms, and then corrects himself. “As far as we know. Certainly meeting you was. He couldn’t have arranged that. No, that was just … something that happened.”
“Is it all random, then?” she restates, unhappily. The Rotterdam incident floats up in her mind, from an epoch ago.
“Up to a point,” he distinguishes. “We can see what’s happening on a large scale. But in micro, we’re dealing with unknowns. Our forecasts can damn well tell you that there’ll be more of this stuff around, but we have no idea where it will flare up next. That’s the advantage these guys have, random aggression. Or maybe it’s just aggressive randomness, maybe they’re just profiting from the way things are.”
He’s speaking zestfully, and there’s no trace of that emollient respect in his voice which marked their earlier conversations. He’s on his own ground now, and he’s enjoying his authority.
“Who’s ‘we’ exactly,” she asks, because she’s irritated at him. Then she feels irritated at the sanctimoniousness of her own question.
“Oh, there isn’t much of a we, unfortunately,” he responds breezily. “I’ve been following this on an ad hoc sort of basis. Frankly, I had to persuade my old pals at the State Department to take any interest in this stuff at all. Not our sphere of influence, really. Except insofar as everything is interconnected.”
“Interconnected and random,” she points out.
“Yeah, that’s about right. Not an easy equation to work with, you must admit. Hard to nail the specifics down.”
“Do you know what they’re up to now?” she asks. “In Anzor’s country? Or God knows where? What they’re planning to do next?”
McElvoy sighs. “If I’m going to be completely honest with you,” he says, “I’d have to say no. We don’t. These characters come into our view and then recede. We have them in our cross hairs, and then all of a sudden they’ve vanished. They are like amoebae, that’s the problem. Or like these clusters of cells which sometimes coagulate into sort of … blood clots. And which then explode or dissolve.” He’s clearly enlivened by the metaphors his analysis is throwing up. “Yeah, that’s a better analogy. They’re not so much random as … protean, these guys. As well as brutal. As well as … evil.”
He almost spits out the last phrase, as if he’s reached the acme of revulsion. There’s a pause. “But we’re going to get the better of them,” he picks up, as if the notion of protean evil energized him with a new sense of purpose. “We’re going to stamp them out. They have no chance in the long run. We’re
going to beat them back, whatever it takes.” He speaks calmly now, but his voice is metallic with determination, with the hard energy of power. More power, she thinks, than she ever heard in Anzor’s voice, in his inflamed pride, or his flaming certainties.
September 13, 1982
“In art as in everything else, one can build only upon a resisting foundation: whatever constantly gives way to pressure, constantly renders movement impossible … Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength.” —Igor Stravinsky.
The resisting foundation: time itself. The basic element from which music is made. I have tried to ignore its surface flow, and to pierce through it to its true nature, its underlying structure. To that place where it is immovable, where motion blends with stillness. Is that hubris? Was I just piercing into my own, strained self? Is the world knowable in itself, or do we only sense it through our always subjective minds, our distorting senses? What can I know of time, except how I live in it, its sheer dread which is the dread of my own end. I cannot defeat time, no matter how much I struggle. I am merely a conduit for it, a reed through which it passes. Sometimes, it sings within me. Sometimes I can hear its obscure message.
September 15, 1982
Music of the spheres, it is not for us. We no longer hear those eternal, elliptical harmonies. We cannot hear them because we cannot believe in them.
September 17, 1982
Left to my own devices, I only know the blankness of daylight, and the blank regrets within me. Sometimes, the face of Renata blends with that of Isabel Merton, as if they existed in the same moment. As if the interval of years between them did not matter. As the passage of time does not matter in my mind, where all memories are juxtaposed, and all lines lead always back to the day I began my composition; the condensed point where time stopped and began. That day, with its blackness and beauty, its two epiphanies. How to do justice to both in one musical language—
Isabel closes the
Journal
and paces around her deluxe cell. Occasionally, she pauses in front of the picture window to contemplate the beating of the ocean against the narrow shore, eerily silent, way down below. Across the passage of time, across the irrevocable movement from the past to the present, she caresses Wolfe’s cheek, and stays pressed against him a fraction of a moment longer as she says good-bye … Yes, there was agape between them, amid the erotics of teaching, an exchange across their shared medium as close as if their minds touched each other.