Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

When the Union Street exit came up, Lucy was out of breath with her windfall cascade of ideas. She wanted to get a rough outline of the article down on paper before it slipped from the present and became something she had to ransack her bad memory for. Entering the apartment, she ignored the red flashes on her answering machine and went straight to her desk, notebook in hand. She’d never felt more certain of what needed to be done.

“MOM’S WRITING,” Ali said.

“Ah, one of those days.”

Ali was full of her trip, and Tad was happy to listen. Elementary Buddhism helped him suppress every niggle of what might otherwise have been his irritation at Ali’s wide-eyed wonder at the marvels of this reactionary old coot. When she showed him the inscription in the book, he said, “Fantastic — cool how he calls himself uncool, huh?”

“He’s pretty cool. We saw dogfish again when we were kayaking, and I wasn’t scared at all. ”

“You get your homework done?”

“Nah, it’s just some math that’ll only take half an hour.”

“Bring it here. If your mom’s so busy writing, I guess I can take care of dinner. I’ve got strawberries and cream, and pasta, and some pesto sauce that I made fresh. We can all feast on that.”

“Great,” Ali said. “Minna, that’s his wife, she’s like a gourmet cook.”

Tad needed a few more grams of Buddhism for that.

Over Tad’s pasta and pesto and ten-dollar wine, Lucy was in a state of silent distraction, hair all over the place like Struwwelpeter’s. Declining the wine, she asked for water, a sure symptom of major mental disturbance. Every so often she’d rouse herself, or try to.

“Did he come here over the weekend?”

“I don’t think so. He’s probably sulking in his tent.”

“Whose tent?” Ali said.

“Achilles’ tent. The landlord’s tent. We’re talking about Mr. Lee.”

“He’s got a tent?”

“It’s just an expression,” Lucy said. “Achilles was this ancient Greek who spent a lot of time sulking in his tent.” Which was about as near as she came to sociability during the course of the entire meal. When she left, after eating three strawberries, she said, “Tad — God, I’m sorry I’m so elsewhere. But thank you. It was lovely.”

“Go enjoy your elsewhere.” Tad kissed her, cheek to cheek. “It’s not as if we’re not used to it, honey. We just wish you were on medication.”

Tad and Ali washed the dishes, then played chess.

Ali took Tad’s last bishop with her knight. “Check… mate !”

“The king is dead,” Tad said.

BY TEN O’CLOCK, Lucy had covered twenty-five pages of her notebook with scrawled notes. To bring off what she wanted to do, in seven thousand words or less, would take extraordinary craft and guile. There was material here for a full-length book about the relationship between journalist and subject, and the prospect of the sheer labor involved in boiling it down to an article made her feel defeated before she’d even begun. But in the morning it would all look different. She needed the fresh eye that she’d bring back from the school run.

Dog-tired, she checked her messages. There were three of them, all from Mrs. Tillman, each more testy than the last, demanding to know whether the package had arrived. It was too early to call England now, and Lucy was damned if she’d stay up till after midnight. More than anything, she craved sleep.

At five A.M. she was punished by the insistent trilling of the phone. She groggily reached for the receiver in the dark.

“Marjie Tillman — I’ve been trying to reach you since Friday.”

“I’m sorry, we were away for the weekend…. just got back. When I got your messages, it was still too early to call you. But thank you, yes, it did come. Excuse me, I’m not too c-c-c-c-c-coherent right now, you see it’s five in the morning here and I was—”

“Five? It’s surely eight!”

Mrs. Tillman was accusing her of self-serving deception. “No, no — it’s eight on the East Coast, like in New York, but we’re three hours behind out here. It’s only five.”

“Well, in that case, perhaps you—”

“No, honestly, I’m awake now, we can t-t-talk—” Better to deal with this call straightaway than to wake again at seven with it still hanging over her head. To get to her piece, she needed to be done with this peremptory and deluded pest. “But thanks so much for getting the picture to me so fast — it must’ve wrecked your day. I’m hugely grateful to you.”

“So now you see.”

“Sorry?”

“It’s him. ”

Speaking gently, trying as best she could not to offend, Lucy explained the differences between the two photos — the change in lighting, the overexposure of Juris Abeltins’ face, exactly how the two sets of barbed wire looked not quite the same. She said, “And then there are the chickens. If you look carefully at the picture of J-J-J-Juris you can see chickens pecking in the background. That’s obviously taken on your farm. But there isn’t a single chicken in the V–V-Vanags one.”

“Well, of course not!” She spoke as if Lucy were a total half-wit. “They use airbrushes and things!”

Lucy remembered the brown envelope of papers that had accompanied Augie all the way from Germany to Useless Bay. He’d asked her to remind him to dig it out for her, and, maddeningly, in the happy conviviality of Saturday’s dinner, when she’d gotten more than a little drunk, she had neglected to do so. The contents of that envelope would prove everything.

“Marjie, August Vanags has papers to prove his identity. He’s not your Juris Abeltins.”

“Papers? What papers?”

“Well…” For inspiration, she rummaged in her memory for the background reading she’d undertaken more than two weeks ago. She had to somehow rid herself of this madwoman at the far end of the line. “There’s a sort of temporary passport issued by…” Who would it be issued by, the embassy? Did they even have an embassy there then? “By the American authorities in Berlin. Then there’s…a l-l-l-letter from his sponsors, a group of Latvians in New York. There’s another letter from Sergeant C–C-Cahan, the soldier who took care of him for a while. Oh, and there’s another one from someone in UNNRA, an Englishwoman, like you. She was in charge of displaced children at the c-c-c-c-camp….” Surely that would do. “And of course there’s the ph-ph-ph-ph-photograph on the book.”

“What’s the date on this so-called passport?”

“I’m not sure. I think…August or S-S-September in 1945?”

“You can’t place it more exactly than that?”

“No.”

“And you’ve seen all these ‘papers’?”

Lucy paused fractionally before saying yes. That she hadn’t seen them was, after all, her own silly fault. And if they weren’t precisely as she’d described them, they must be very similar. There was no doubt in her mind as to the existence of the brown envelope.

Thousands of miles away in Thetford, Norfolk, there was silence. Evidently Mrs. Tillman was taking time to adjust to the fact that she’d been wrong from the start. At last, her voice came back on the line. “Miss Bengstrom?”

“Yes?”

“ If these ‘papers’ exist — which I have to say, with all due respect, I rather doubt — they’re forgeries.”

A click at the other end, and then the dial tone.

IT HAD BEEN FIVE in the morning, after all — a time when anyone could be forgiven for being, as Augie liked to say, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. Besides, Marjorie Tillman was both unbelievably rude and downright crazy, possessed by her unshakable but totally bogus idée fixe. If she really had anything on Augie, as opposed to Juris Abeltins, she’d have said so in her letter, which Lucy pulled out and read carefully again. It was simply a long, tedious complaint about the immense inconvenience to which her family had been put by harboring the boy. There were rambling, digressive paragraphs about ration books, the coeliac stuff, the Jenny Lind Hospital, and something they’d had to eat, apparently called snoek, if Lucy was reading the word right; rants about a politician named Herbert Morrison, the bananas that had to be specially flown in, about the indignities of being forced to raise chickens; scattered admiration for “Winnie,” whom Lucy took to mean Churchill; but otherwise only ingratitude — how could the child be so ungrateful to his benefactors? There was nothing whatsoever to connect Juris Abeltins with August Vanags. No wonder the poor kid had never written back to the Vickers family, who appeared to have treated him like Oliver Twist in the workhouse.