Blind Date

  “It’s Eskimo,” Levanter replied. He turned back to Romarkin, hoping she understood that her services were of no interest to them.

  She laughed. “Eskimo? Come on, don’t be silly. What are you?”

  Levanter made himself look angry. “I resent your laughter and attitude, Mademoiselle,” he said. “We are Eskimo, and we are proud of it.”

  The woman continued to giggle. “But, Monsieur, Eskimos look like this,” she said, pulling back the skin on her temples and squinting. “Like frozen Chinese! But you —” She stopped, as if to search her memory. “You two could be Italian or perhaps Greek. But not Eskimo.”

  “Mademoiselle,” Levanter said harshly, “we Eskimos are a proud race, and we are no more ‘frozen Chinese’ than the French are ‘marinated Italians’ or the Swedes ‘mummified Germans.’” In a final attempt to send her away without insulting her, Levanter spoke to her in a confidential tone. “You see, my friend here and I are in Paris to secure your government’s aid in our revolutionary struggle to free ourselves from American and Canadian colonialism. We have just met with your Minister of Foreign Affairs.” She was no longer laughing. “So now, Mademoiselle, we must go back to discussing our business undisturbed.”

  The woman flushed. “Please forgive me, Monsieur,” she pleaded. “I’m ignorant about Eskimos because I don’t have much education. But I’m not against Eskimos or anybody. In my line of work I can’t afford to be prejudiced.” She stood up and, without even straightening her skirt, quickly slipped away.

  A little while later, a resounding drum roll interrupted them again. The proprietor of the club hurried onto the stage. He had opened his doors at the end of World War II, he announced, and since then his club had welcomed many distinguished and exotic guests. But tonight was truly special. For the first time ever, he said, he had the privilege of welcoming two real Eskimos, distinguished representatives of their esteemed nation. He spread his arms and solemnly bowed toward Levanter and Romarkin. The spotlight was turned from the stage onto their table. Everyone — the loners at the bar, the prostitutes and the waiters, the handholding couples at the tables — turned to see the two Eskimos and started to applaud fervently. The band struck up the “Marseillaise.”

  Levanter hunched down in his chair, his head lowered. Romarkin, however, seemed to enjoy the sudden attention. He rose and extended his hands toward the clapping crowd.

  The proprietor called for silence and, all smiles, addressed Romarkin. “One of our charming hostesses had the pleasure to hear you speak your beautiful Eskimo language,” he said. “For the rest of us who have not had the privilege, may I prevail upon you to say something to us in Eskimo — a poem, a phrase, a word, anything?” The guests began to applaud again.

  Romarkin bowed to the audience. Levanter suddenly felt he was back in that auditorium in Moscow. He tugged on Romarkin’s jacket, trying to force his friend to sit down. He was too late.

  As though about to deliver a prepared speech from a dais, Romarkin puffed up his chest, then, in a loud, clear voice he began to swear in Russian. It was the juiciest vocabulary of obscenities Levanter had heard since his Barbatov army days. Romarkin finished with a theatrical flourish that drew enthusiastic applause from his listeners. But not from all of them.

  Two burly men at the bar did not join in. When Romarkin started his harangue, they had straightened as if prodded by red-hot pokers. When he finished, they angrily smashed their glasses on the floor and began to yell at Romarkin in Russian. They could tell by his obscene Soviet lingo, they shouted, that he was one of Stalin’s bully boys. But this was France, they screamed, storming toward Romarkin through the clutter of tables, and he had no right to assault them with his filthy tongue just because they were old Russian émigrés and he was, no doubt, a Soviet agent posing as a tourist. Incensed, raging and ranting, they pushed chairs and people aside in their mad scramble to reach him.

  The proprietor seemed unable to move. The waiters stood by helplessly, perplexed to see other Eskimos in their club and baffled that one Eskimo’s remarks should have offended his countrymen.

  Levanter and Romarkin barricaded themselves behind two tables, hurling glasses and bottles at their attackers and defending themselves with chairs. Soon the police arrived. Levanter quickly assured the proprietor that if he and Romarkin were not arrested he would immediately pay for the damaged property. Pleading with the police to release Levanter and his friend, the proprietor explained that Eskimos, like the French, were often known to clash over their political views.

  The day after his friend’s nightclub speech, Levanter went to see Jacques Monod, the French biologist and philosopher, whom he had first met when Monod was on a research trip in the United States. Levanter recounted the story of Romarkin, beginning in Moscow.

  “Even now, in France,” Monod said, “your friend Romarkin doesn’t dare to admit that blind chance and nothing else is responsible for each random event of his life. Instead, he is searching for a religion that, like Marxism, will assure him that man’s destiny is spelled out in the central plot of life. Meanwhile, believing in the existence of an orderly, predetermined life scheme, Romarkin bypasses the drama of each unique instance of his own existence. Yet, to accept a notion of destiny, he might as well believe in astrology, or palm reading, or pulp novels, all of which pretend that one’s future is already set and needs only to be lived out.

  As Monod reached for a cup of tea, Levanter noticed a slight tremor in his hand.

  “Are you not well?” asked Levanter.

  “I haven’t been for some time,” said Monod. He managed to restrain the trembling long enough to pick up the teacup.

  “What is it?” Levanter asked.

  Monod named the condition. “It was diagnosed at the onset, a few months ago,” he said, sipping his tea.

  Levanter was stunned. Monod, who had contributed so much to the world’s knowledge of how the living cell manufactures the substance of life, was being deprived of this very substance; he had a disease for which there was no known treatment.

  He was only sixty-six years old. He looked healthy and was continuing to conduct his research, attend scientific conferences, and on weekends sail his boat and drive his sports car. Looking at him now, Levanter found it inconceivable that Jacques Monod would soon die.

  Levanter struggled to remain calm. “Is anything being done?”

  “Increasingly frequent blood transfusions.” Monod dismissed the subject. He mentioned that he would be leaving for Cannes and suggested that Levanter go there too so they could spend some time together.

  “Won’t you find the trip rather tiring just for the weekend?” Levanter asked.

  “I’m not going just for the weekend,” Monod replied.

  “But the transfusions? Can they be done there?” asked Levanter. Monod said nothing. Levanter felt his throat constrict. “Why won’t you remain in Paris? All the life-support equipment is here.”

  Monod looked at him steadfastly. “To be hooked up to life through a machine?” he asked abruptly. “The flame isn’t worth the candle.”

  At any given time in history, Levanter’s father once claimed, civilization is the result of sheer chance plus a thousand or two exceptional men and women of ideas and action, most of whom know or have heard of each other. If you were one of them and wished to become acquainted with any other, you needed no more than two or three consecutive introductions. Levanter had discovered that, regardless of the field in which they excelled, all these men and women were, at least at some time in their lives, small investors, people who risked their personal energy and means to achieve certain unpredictable ends.

  One day, after a meeting at a large New York publishing house, Levanter stopped by unannounced to see a friend who was an editor there. She was going over a set of galley proofs with an imposing, gray-haired man, whom she introduced to Levanter. It was Charles Lindbergh, the aviator. To Levanter, Lindbergh was heroic but tragic: a man who achieved international fame, only to becom
e, as a result of the media’s obsession with a crime against his family, one of the world’s most hounded public figures. Levanter apologized for interrupting and turned to leave.

  Lindbergh said, “Please stay. We’re almost finished.”

  Levanter and Lindbergh left at the same time. It was a clear fall day, and Lindbergh proposed they walk for a few blocks. As he steered Levanter up Fifth Avenue, he affected a slight stoop and tugged the brim of his hat down over his face. Levanter surmised that this public posture had become second nature to Lindbergh after years of trying to avoid recognition.

  “I know you flew over Eastern Europe before the war,” Levanter said. “A few years later, during the war, when I was six, I was separated from my family and wandered alone through the same villages you saw from your plane.”

  Lindbergh recalled his flight very well. He was on his way to visit the Soviet Union, flying his plane over the Ruthenian flatlands, the narrow rivers, lakes, and marshes that seemed never to end. He remembered the small villages and how from above they had appeared like islands in the midst of swamps, the poor peasant huts with roofs of thatched rye and wheat, the haystacks scattered about.

  Levanter said that when the flight of The Spirit of St. Louis bridged the two continents, Levanter’s family had considered Lindbergh one of this century’s greatest heroes. But later, when Lindbergh received the Order of the German Eagle from Goering, its citation signed by Adolf Hitler, Lindbergh had dealt a frightful blow to their faith in human wisdom. Later, Levanter’s parents were distressed and baffled by Lindbergh’s participation in the America First movement, which was dedicated to keeping the United States out of the war.

  “When the war was over,” Levanter said, “my parents felt that we had survived because America finally entered and helped to win the war. And they felt that the rest of our family — sixty of them — had died because America First was a great influence in keeping America out of the war for so long.”

  They walked for a while without speaking. Then, almost as an afterthought, Lindbergh said that when he went to Germany and the Soviet Union in the thirties, he perceived his visits as good-will missions, just as his flight had been. He had sensed, he explained, that the Germans, who were themselves obsessed with ethnic origins, were relieved that Lindbergh bore them no ill will because the convicted kidnapper of his baby was of German origin. The Soviets, on the other hand, he said, invited him to inspect their aviation industry in the hope that he would praise it. When he did not, their propaganda soon labeled him a fascist.

  At the entrance to Central Park, a short woman in a mink jacket approached them, displaying lipstick-smeared teeth behind a gushing smile. Lindbergh cringed and began to back away, but it was Levanter the woman was after.

  “I know you. I’ve seen you on TV!” she exclaimed in a high-pitched voice.

  Levanter, who only occasionally appeared on television on behalf of Investors International, turned away. He took Lindbergh’s arm and started to walk on, but the woman dogged their steps.

  “Haven’t I seen you on TV?” she demanded.

  “You must be confusing me with someone else,” said Levanter emphatically.

  Disappointed, she walked away.

  About a year later, Levanter was traveling in Switzerland and visited Lindbergh at his chalet there. Lindbergh invited him and his friends for a meal at a nearby inn.

  During dinner, Levanter suddenly realized that he had forgotten his attaché case under a chair in the lobby of his hotel. In the case were not only his passport, credit cards, and money but also the only copy of the unpublished results of a pilot study that he had spent the past months compiling. He was afraid that if he called the hotel, the person sent to look for it might steal the case, simply claiming that it hadn’t been there. Yet the longer he waited, the greater was the likelihood that he would lose it. Nervous and uncertain about what to do, he stopped eating and fidgeted in his chair.

  Lindbergh leaned toward him and asked quietly, “What’s wrong?” Levanter told him about the attaché case and how worried he was about the manuscript in it.

  “Come, I’ll drive you to the hotel right now,” Lindbergh said.

  “But your dinner —”

  “I don’t need to finish. Let’s go.”

  As they drove, Lindbergh praised his small automobile as a marvel of German engineering. With only simple reconditioning of the engine, he said, his car had gone well over a hundred thousand miles.

  Levanter said he had been surprised to find so many expressions of positive interest in the Germany of the Third Reich in Lindbergh’s book. Lindbergh explained that, compared to other countries he had visited before the war, Germany seemed to him to strive for a more efficiently organized means of production and had achieved admirable technological progress in aeronautics. He thought of the German state as an airplane and of its racial hatred, persecution, and aggression in the early thirties, as a temporary flight aberration caused by the pilot’s misreading of the plane’s control panel. Later, he realized he was wrong, and this was one of the many lessons he had derived from life. Mass atrocities, he said, like acts of individual heroism, often appear unthinkable before they occur.

  “And inevitable only after,” said Levanter.

  “What is your manuscript about?” Lindbergh asked.

  “A study of individuals,” Levanter explained, “who through chance accidents have been propelled into national prominence and become important investors.”

  From the black shroud of sky, a snowstorm was spreading a white mantle over the earth. Lindbergh’s small car plowed slowly against the icy wind. He drove with steady hands, looking unwaveringly ahead. The car, engulfed in a blanket of moving snow, was like an airplane lost to everyone but its pilot, steadily pushing through the clouds, ice, and wind.

  They found the attaché case, untouched, under the chair in the hotel lobby. They started back. The storm had passed, and the night was cold, the sky clear. Unexpectedly, Lindbergh stopped the car and turned off the engine. He got out, motioning Levanter to follow him. From above came the sound of a jet plane, its drone growing more and more persistent as it moved closer. Lindbergh listened. When the plane’s flickering lights came clearly into sight, he pointed toward it.

  “Another 747, right above us!” he exclaimed. “One of the safest planes ever built!” He looked up at the sky, listening to the sound of the jet engines reverberating in the air long after the plane disappeared into the darkness.

  It was Levanter’s fifteenth Christmas in his new country. He hailed a cab. The driver, an older man, was voluble and friendly and they struck up a conversation. The man mentioned that he had come to the United States from Eastern Europe after World War II. He named the town he was from.

  “That’s the very town where some of my relatives once lived,” Levanter said.

  The driver was clearly delighted. “Can you remember their address?” he asked.

  Levanter named the street.

  “Small world!” exclaimed the driver. “My brother and I owned a grocery right in the neighborhood. It was a tiny street, with only three private houses. I delivered groceries to all of them.”

  “Then you knew number nine?” asked Levanter.

  They were stopped at a traffic light. The driver turned around. “I sure did. Nine — the last house on the left. It was like a villa. A couple lived there, an old professor and his young wife, a pianist. They had a boy who was sick in the head.” He glanced at Levanter in the rearview mirror. “Were those your relatives?”

  “Yes,” said Levanter. “Why do you say their boy was crazy?”

  The driver pondered for a while. “I saw him myself. He couldn’t speak. Never smiled or laughed. Just kept staring at you. Their own maid was afraid of him. She told me he would sneak out alone at night and stay away until morning, then sleep during the day. A real spook.” The light changed and he drove on.

  “After the war a lot of children couldn’t speak,” said Levanter, “or s
mile or laugh or play in the daylight.”

  The driver shook his head. “This one was not like other kids,” he said. “I saw him. He was crazy. No doubt about it.”

  “As I remember him,” Levanter said, “the kid was quite normal.”

  For a few moments the driver was silent, concentrating on the traffic, and Levanter thought he had dropped the subject.

  “Believe me, he was crazy,” said the driver as he pulled up at Levanter’s destination. “But that’s almost thirty years ago. You couldn’t have been more than a kid yourself,” he continued, taking another look at Levanter.

  “Perhaps I was too young to know this kid when you knew him,” said Levanter as he paid the fare. “But when we got older, I came to know him better. He was no crazier than you or I.”

  “What do you mean?” asked the driver.

  “That story’s for another ride,” said Levanter, leaving the cab.

  Levanter often reflected that his European upbringing was probably responsible for his tendency to pay far more attention to forms, questionnaires, letterheads, and rubber stamps than most native-born Americans. And he never sent an envelope without extra touches — self-adhesive mail stickers: FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY, RUSH, HANDLE WITH CARE, UNCLASSIFIED, SPECIAL ATTENTION — which he knew would attract attention and distinguish his letters from all other mail. An American business friend told him that any time one of Levanter’s envelopes arrived, his secretary was certain that the letter should not wait a minute longer and delivered it to her boss immediately, even if it meant dispatching it to his home by messenger.

  One day Levanter ran into one of his current correspondents, a friend who had spent the summer at his family’s home in the South. He seemed a bit uneasy when he saw Levanter but agreed to join him for a drink.

  “I keep marveling at the care you give your mail,” he said after a moment. “Your letters really create a great stir.”

  Levanter looked at him quizzically.

  His friend went on. “All those colorful labels stuck on each envelope,” he said. “Even the mailman was intimidated. A couple of times he made separate trips to bring your letters, as if they were special delivery, even though all the stickers said was EXPEDITE or VERY URGENT or CONFIDENTIAL.”