Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

When Alida left, Lucy gazed at her notebook, her mind devoid of every thought except the certainty that she shouldn’t have allowed things to turn out like this. The rats’ nest of work all tangled up with friendship had placed her in a hopelessly compromised position. Whatever she wrote after this weekend was bound to be untrue. She tried to accuse herself of having too many scruples, but decided that the opposite was closer to the mark: she had too few.

She stared blankly out the window, and the fast-receding sea looked as glum and gray as she was feeling now.

MINNA WAS on her regular daily path through the grasses and Scotch broom, her basket filling with greenstuffs for a lunch salad. She’d looked forward to having Lucy’s company, but Lucy was up in her room and Minna was shy of disturbing her. So she walked alone, letting her mind drift in whatever direction it chose.

This weekend took her back to the days when she and Augie were first married, and he used to invite his students back to their little rental house for end-of-semester parties. Minna loved these student parties, though she dreaded faculty ones, where the faculty wives were always asking her, “Where were you?” meaning “Were you at Bennington? Or OSU? Or Stanford?” Then she’d have to say she’d worked at Seafirst Bank. Then they’d ask what she did there, already looking for an excuse to walk away.

With students it was different — like it was with Lucy and Alida. But how they drank and smoked in those days! She had to fumigate the house after each party, but still was eager to throw the next one, where students introduced her to Ray Charles, Peter, Paul and Mary, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Dusty Springfield, the Beach Boys, and Bob Dylan, confided their love lives to her, and taught her to smoke pot. Augie never smoked any, but she loved how warm, colorful, and friendly the world seemed when she was high.

She and Augie used to go to the students’ own, even wilder, parties, on falling-to-pieces old houseboats and in joss-stick-smelling walk-up flats, and always the invites came directly to her, though of course Augie was asked to come along, too. She could still recall the students’ names — La Verne Geiger, Byford Starling, Melvin Kolar, Ron Schnowske, Betty Frailey, Kermit James, Arlo Fruin, Janet Bane…Strange how last week was hard to remember, when things so long ago were crystal clear.

Lucy and Alida somehow triggered these memories. Not that they were like students, but they’d brought with them into the house on Useless Bay some happy vestige of that mood. Minna wondered if Lucy liked Bob Dylan, then remembered her LPs wouldn’t play on Augie’s new stereo system. Minutes later, she recalled they’d got rid of them when they moved out here from Seattle. She’d wanted to hold a yard sale, but Augie had called in a charity for the blind to haul all their old junk away.

In the small stand of trees by the stream, she found three clumps of moist, honey-colored chanterelles. They’d go great tonight with the remainder of the beef burgundy. As she picked, she listened in her head to “Ballad of a Thin Man,” Dylan singing, “Something is happening but you don’t know what it is. Do you, Mr. Jones?”

It was when Mr. Johnson was president, she remembered, and the students were burning their draft cards, that all the parties stopped.

AFTER LUNCH they were up in the Jeffersonian study. Lucy surreptitiously scanned the shelves for novels and war memoirs, but didn’t see a single one. Augie had been talking about his first days in America, first in New York, and then in Schenectady, where he’d “bached with” a Latvian-American widow.

“And the photo of you on the dust jacket — the one taken by Sergeant Cahan — you carried that with you wherever you went?”

“I didn’t have too many papers — you can imagine. The Latvian aid people in New York got together what they could, including that picture. I still have the old brown envelope. There isn’t much in it.”

“I’d love to see it.”

“Sure. I’ll dig it out for you. Remind me.”

“I don’t suppose the name Thetford means anything to you, does it?”

“ Thetford …Only Thetford I know is a town in England. I think it’s in the Midlands — no, East Anglia. Minna and I, we vacationed over there once — I had to do some research, not on sand dollars, at the British Museum Library and the Bodleian in Oxford. We drove around the country as much as we could, and spent one night in Norwich.” He said Norwitch. “They’ve got a castle there, and a cathedral that Cromwell knocked around a bit. Thetford’s near Norwich, I believe. Seems like we drove through it but didn’t stop. Why do you ask?”

“Because an odd woman from Thetford sent me this.” She got the photograph from her bag. “She thinks it could be you.”

“Yeah, looks like me. Though it’s difficult to make out the face.” He took it over to the window, tilting it to catch the diffuse sunlight. “Why’d she send it to you?”

“Oh, you know. I’ve been trying to do some not-on-sand-dollars research.”

“Hey, what’s that? And there’s another, I think.” He pulled open the drawer of his desk and found a magnifying glass. “Look,” he said, pointing at the dirt in the background, holding the glass over it. “Doesn’t that look to you like a chicken?”

Preoccupied with the boy and the barbed wire, she hadn’t properly attended to the dirt. There was a distinct but out-of-focus chicken shape there, the same nearly black color as the earth.

“And there’s the other one.”

“You’re absolutely right.”

Augie laughed. “Couldn’t be me. If I’d been that close to chickens in those days, I wouldn’t have been lallygagging by that fence. I’d be wringing those critters’ necks.”

His tone was light, open, guileless. Lucy, certain now that she was looking at a picture of Juris Abeltins, no relation to August Vanags, felt giddy with relief. She said, “But isn’t it a weird coincidence — that boy, the wire, and all?”

“He looks like he’s living in the land of plenty. So why’s he all skin and bone?”

“He had a disease called coeliac. His name was Juris Abeltins.”

He corrected her pronunciation and said, “Latvian, like me.” He checked his watch. “Gotta go — date out on the water at four o’clock sharp.”

Looking out the window, she saw the sea was back. On the sand berm at the end of the lawn, Alida, in T-shirt and jeans, was buckling herself into a life vest. “Have a great paddle, or whatever one says.”

She preceded him down the stairs. At the bottom, he said, “Juris Abeltins! Well, whaddaya know!”

He moved to join Alida on the berm, while Lucy went in search of Minna.

FOR AS LONG NOW as it seemed he could remember, he’d spent nearly all his time brooding in his office suite. It was torture to him to drag himself on his rounds through the city on necessary business; he got through it as fast as he could, then drove back to Occidental Avenue to tend his wounds. He wasn’t awake and he wasn’t asleep — at once fully conscious and in the grip of a terrible dream. No distraction worked. When he tried to read, the words were foreign symbols on the page. The cartoons he watched were meaningless colored drawings on a screen. He noticed neither darkness nor light outside. He ate, pissed, and shat — the only punctuations of his unending, unendurable days. Nothing could divert him from the memory of the scene in #701, at which his whole being went rigid with fury and shame.

One thing he knew: he was through with people business. Parking lots were clean, uncomplicated by comparison, generating a revenue stream as pure and untainted as a river gushing from a mountain crag, while the people business was as contaminated as a pipe of swirling sewage, drenching him in filth from head to foot.