Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

“Yes,” Lucy said, though she’d always locked her food in the trunk of her car and hoped for the best. She and Alida had never encountered a bear.

“There’s signs posted all over warning about not leaving food out, but nothing stops dumbasses from making nice to the bears by giving ’em candy and french fries. I’ve seen it happen. And the quickest way of getting liquidated by a bear is to appeal to his good side. It’s taken us a long time to learn that lesson: it’s frightening that so many people in this country still don’t get it.”

Hands stuffed deep in pockets, hunch-shouldered, Augie glowered into his bookshelves. “I guess I’m being naive. What do I know? I’m still a rookie citizen even now. I can get teary just reading the Constitution. So when I see my country under threat, I want to reach for my musket and be a Minuteman.”

For a moment, Lucy saw him ridiculously sculpted on a marble plinth, his false teeth and peppery white mustache cast in heroic bronze, and smiled at the thought.

He seized on the smile. “It gets worse. I used to take Minna to see the Mariners. Some leukemia survivor kid’s singing ‘Oh, say can you see, by the dawn’s early light,’ and Minna’s feeding me Kleenex out of her bag. It totally chokes me up. Then I see the immigrants way up in the bleachers — the Chinese, Koreans, Ukrainians, Afghanis — and they’re all sobbing their guts out, you can see their shoulders heaving. They’re not crying over the little kid with leukemia, they’re crying over the national anthem and what it means to them. Might strike a native-born American as hopelessly sappy, but to someone like me…” He was blinking furiously as he spoke. “See, people like you’ve never known what it’s like to not be an American. It gives you a different perspective on things. It teaches you how easy it’d be for America not to be America anymore.”

Lucy had edged toward the desk, near enough to read what was written on the typewriter there, but could make out only one word, “Minna”; the rest appeared to be in German. “That’s what your book does,” she said. “I hadn’t thought about it quite like that, but what I loved about it, I think, was that it reminded me of stuff I’ve always taken for granted.”

“Never take it for granted,” Augie said. “It’s the littlest things. You know, not so long after I got to this country, when I was in grad school, I came across something E. B. White wrote about democracy during World War II. You know E. B. White? I memorized it on the Greyhound bus. We’d be traveling through little no-stoplight towns in the cornfields, and I’d look out the window and see people mowing their lawns, or reading the paper on the porch, or going to the store, or cranking up the car that wouldn’t start, and all I’d hear in my head would be E. B. White…”

He cleared his throat, threw back his head, closed his eyes, and recited. “‘Democracy is the line that forms on the right. It’s the don’t in “Don’t Shove.” It’s the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles; it’s the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half the people are right more than half of the time. It’s the feeling of privacy in voting booths, the feeling of communion in libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It’s an idea which hasn’t been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It’s the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from the War Board, in the middle of a morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is.’”

“I never read that — it’s beautiful,” Lucy said, but she’d barely heard the words, so distracted was she by the fact that Augie had spoken them in a throaty middle-European accent.

“E. B. White wrote that in New York in ’44.” He was back to being an American again. “Know where I was then? Town called Goslar — picturesque old place, full of steeples and church bells, right on the edge of the Harz mountains. I was learning to be a good Nazi.”

“You flunked.”

“Yeah. Got slung out of there for stealing. I was a pretty good thief, so I must’ve wanted to get caught, I guess. Goslar was too quiet for me — no planes, no bombs. I got spooked by the silence at night, and I was plain bored in the daytime. For me, it was too much like life with the Widow Douglas. I thought being a Nazi might be kind of fun, but it was no fun at all. I liked my crooked ways a whole lot better.”

A sudden ruckus sounded from beyond the open window — a dozen or so gulls fighting over some treasure at the tide’s edge in a manic flurry of wings, bursting the bubblelike quiet of the afternoon with peevish yelps and screeches.

“I think they must’ve found the gumboot-whatsit,” Lucy said.

“Chiton. I do hope not.” The look of slack-lipped anxiety on his face as he peered out the window was absurdly disproportionate to the occasion. He grabbed the loaf beside the typewriter and pitched it out toward the distant gulls. For a pint-sized retired professor he had an amazingly mighty right arm, and as Lucy watched the bread sailing high over the lawn she almost believed that it would land squarely in the commotion on the beach; but it fell short, as it must, and came to earth among the piles of driftwood by the twin kayaks on the berm — just close enough for a small flight of gulls to peel away from the main action to investigate. In the dead-still air, she heard their claws scrabbling on wood as they jostled for possession of the bread.

“It’s all right, I think. I’m pretty sure I carried the chiton farther out, so the tide should’ve covered it by now.”

“That bread was conveniently handy.”

“Fetish,” Augie said. “It’s a thing I’ve always had. Never could work without a loaf of bread close by me. I take one up every morning. It’s quite common, so I’ve read — Jews from the camps often do it. There was a time when I used to hoard them in drawers, but I got over that. Minna used to think it very weird when she kept finding bits of stale bread hidden under my socks.” His face clouded as he looked out at the fighting birds. “Gulls are one of the very few predators of chitons. It said that in the book.”

The huge bay was almost full now, the unrippled water like a film of Saran Wrap stretched tight from shore to shore. For a short second, Lucy caught a glimpse of rust-red at the epicenter of the gulls’ frenzy. She hoped that Augie hadn’t seen it, too. To distract him, she said, “I want to write about you, you know — for a m-m-m-m-magazine,” deploying her stutter for whatever slight charm it might be worth.

“You have great eyes, Lucille.”

EYE ON THE CLOCK, she drove back to the ferry as fast as she dared. Climbing the hill where the accident had happened, she slowed, readying herself for whatever might lie over the brow. Eerily, nothing at all was left of the shambles of a few hours before: no swerving black skid marks on the pavement, no muddy gouges in the roadside grass, no slivers of overlooked wreckage, nothing . Every trace of the event had been removed or wiped clean, and for a dizzying moment Lucy found herself wondering if she’d imagined it. So thoroughly had the emergency services done their job that it was as if they’d made the accident unhappen, turning it into a harmless trick of the morning light.

At the terminal, lines of waiting vehicles filled the parking area and there was a two-ferry delay on boarding. Security was out in force, with stone-faced soldiers and state patrol troopers with harnessed sniffer dogs. A red-letter placard at the head of each line warned drivers not to joke with security personnel.