Don Delillo - Falling Man

“Martin Ridnour.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell me once that’s not his real name?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe,” Nina said.

“If I heard it, then it came from you. Is that his real name?”

“No.”

“I don’t think you told me his real name.”

“Maybe I don’t know his real name.”

“Twenty years.”

“Not continuously. Not even for prolonged periods. He’s somewhere, I’m somewhere else.”

“He has a wife.”

“She’s somewhere else too.”

“Twenty years. Traveling with him. Sleeping with him.”

“Why do I have to know his name? He’s Martin. What will I know about him if I know his name that I don’t know now?”

“You’ll know his name.”

“He’s Martin.”

“You’ll know his name. This is nice to know.”

Her mother nodded toward the two paintings on the north wall.

“When we first knew each other I talked to him about Giorgio Morandi. Showed him a book. Beautiful still lifes. Form, color, depth. He was just getting started in the business and barely knew Morandi’s name. Went to Bologna to see the work firsthand. Came back saying no, no, no, no. Minor artist. Empty, self-involved, bourgeois. Basically a Marxist critique, this is what Martin delivered.”

“Twenty years later.”

“He sees form, color, depth, beauty.”

“Is this an advance in aesthetics?”

“He sees the light.”

“Or a sellout, a self-deception. Remarks of a property owner.”

“He sees the light,” Nina said.

“He also sees the money. These are very pricey objects.”

“Yes, they are. And at first, quite seriously, I wondered how he’d acquired them. I suspect in those early years he sometimes dealt in stolen art.”

“Interesting fellow.”

“He said to me once, I’ve done some things. He said, This doesn’t make my life more interesting than yours. It can be made to sound more interesting. But in memory, in those depths, he said, there is not much vivid color or wild excitement. It is all gray and waiting. Sitting, waiting. He said, It is all sort of neutral, you know.”

She did the accent with a deft edge, maybe a little nasty.

“What was he waiting for?”

“History, I think. The call to action. The visit from the police.”

“Which branch of the police?”

“Not the art-theft squad. I know one thing. He was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One. Demonstrating against the German state, the fascist state. That’s how they saw it. First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs. After that I’m not sure what he did. I think he was in Italy for a while, in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. But I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No.”

“Twenty years. Eating and sleeping together. You don’t know. Did you ask him? Did you press him?”

“He showed me a poster once, a few years ago, when I saw him in Berlin. He keeps an apartment there. A wanted poster. German terrorists of the early seventies. Nineteen names and faces.”

“Nineteen.”

“Wanted for murder, bombings, bank robberies. He keeps it-I don’t know why he keeps it. But I know why he showed it to me. He’s not one of the faces on the poster.”

“Nineteen.”

“Men and women. I counted. He may have been part of a support group or a sleeper cell. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood.”

“Do they make him nostalgic?”

“Don’t think I won’t bring this up.”

“Bare walls. Nearly bare, you said. Is this part of the old longing? Days and nights in seclusion, hiding out somewhere, renouncing every trace of material comfort. Maybe he killed someone. Did you ask him? Did you press him on this?”

“Look, if he’d done something serious, causing death or injury, do you think he’d be walking around today? He’s not in hiding anymore, if he ever was. He’s here, there and everywhere.”

“Operating under a false name,” Lianne said.

She was on the sofa, facing her mother, watching her. She’d never detected a weakness in Nina, none that she could recall, some frailty of character or compromise of hard clear judgment. She found herself prepared to take advantage and this surprised her. She was ready to bleed the moment, bearing in, ripping in.

“All these years. Never forcing the issue. Look at the man he’s become, the man we know. Isn’t this the kind of man they would have seen as the enemy? Those men and women on the wanted poster. Kidnap the bastard. Burn his paintings.”

“Oh I think he knows this. Don’t you think he knows this?”

“But what do you know? Don’t you pay a price for not knowing?”

“It’s my price. Shut up,” her mother said.

She drew a cigarette from the pack and held it. She seemed to be thinking into some distant matter, not remembering so much as measuring, marking the reach or degree of something, the meaning of something.

“The one wall that holds an object is in Berlin.”

“The wanted poster.”

“The poster does not hang. He keeps the poster in a closet, in a mailing tube. No, it’s a small photograph in a plain frame, hanging over his bed. He and I, a snapshot. We’re standing before a church in one of the hill towns in Umbria. We’d met only a day earlier. He asked a woman walking by to take our picture.”

“Why do I hate this story?”

“His name is Ernst Hechinger. You hate this story because you think it shames me. Makes me complicit in a maudlin gesture, a pathetic gesture. Foolish little snapshot. The one object he displays.”

“Have you tried to determine whether this man Ernst Hechinger is wanted by the police somewhere in Europe? Just to know. To stop saying I don’t know.”

She wanted to punish her mother but not for Martin or not just for that. It was nearer and deeper and finally about one thing only. This is what everything was about, who they were, the fierce clasp, like hands bound in prayer, now and evermore.

Nina lit the cigarette and exhaled. She made it seem an effort to do this, breathe out smoke. She was drowsy again. One of her medications contained codeine phosphate and she was careful when taking it until recently. It was only days in fact, a week or so, since she’d stopped following the exercise regimen without altering her intake of painkillers. Lianne believed that this slackness of will was a defeat that had Martin in the middle of it. These were his nineteen, these hijackers, these jihadists, even if only in her mother’s mind.

“What are you working on?”

“Book on ancient alphabets. All the forms writing took, all the materials they used.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“You ought to read this book.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Interesting, demanding, deeply enjoyable at times. Drawing as well. Pictorial writing. I’ll get you a copy when it’s published.”

“Pictograms, hieroglyphics, cuneiform,” her mother said.

She appeared to be dreaming aloud.

She said, “Sumerians, Assyrians, so on.”

“I’ll get you a copy, definitely.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Lianne said.

The cheese and fruit were on a platter in the kitchen. She sat with her mother a moment longer and then went in to get the food.

Three of the cardplayers were called by last name only, Dockery, Rumsey, Hovanis, and two by first name, Demetrius and Keith. Terry Cheng was Terry Cheng.

Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An a for the u. Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the u, the rum, that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. This would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.