Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

“Nothing?”

“Be afraid of people who say there is meaning from life. Meaning only comes when there is ending.”

“I don’t agree with that.”

“Because you read too many tall stories when you are short girl. You believe things end in beauty. You think loose strings tie up.”

“Not necessarily.” She stretched out on the couch, stuffing her socked feet under him for warmth. “Did you talk to anyone yet today?”

“Many persons.”

“Who?”

“John Stuart Mill, for example. Also Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Maybe you hear of them?”

“I don’t count dead philosophers. And before you tell me those aren’t philosophers but eighteenth-century thinkers, then—”

“John Stuart Mill not even born till nineteenth century, darlink.”

“Did you talk out loud to anyone today?”

“I talk to you now. Are you not counting as twentieth-century thinker?”

“Not sure I qualify as a great thinker of the twentieth century, no.”

“Whatever century you are not a thinker in, I talk to you. Satisfied?”

She grabbed him around the middle. He fought weakly to escape, Ping-Pong balls popping from his pockets, bouncing everywhere. “How long cuddling must last?”

“Torture, is it?” She knew herself to be the last person on earth who still embraced this musty old man. She gave him a peck on the cheek.

“Incredible what I put up with around here,” he grumbled. “I wouldn’t believe, if I did not see it with my own ears.” He looked at her. “Tooly, I must tell you serious items.”

“Items and activities?”

“Stop teasing. I have things to say.”

“About?”

“About …” He stood unsteadily, turned as if caged, took his seat.

The history of Humphrey was a convoluted one. In certain accounts that she had heard, he’d escaped the Soviet Union as a young man and left his parents behind, never to see them again. But in another story he was playing poker with his father, mysteriously present in South Africa. Confusing the situation were myths that circulated: that he’d lived in China and worked for Mao (too industrious to be credible); that he’d been a croupier in Macao (surely not — his arithmetic was abysmal); that he’d dealt in stolen penicillin in postwar Vienna (he did seem to know a lot about pharmaceuticals); that he was privately rich (no evidence of this); that he was destitute (ample signs); that he was a Jewish aristocrat whose Mitteleuropa family had lost everything in the war (there was nothing aristocratic about the man).

According to Humphrey himself, he grew up in Leningrad in the 1930s, in a secular Russian-Jewish family. Like most Soviet citizens, they suffered appalling privation during World War II. However, wartime constituted something of a gap in his tale. One of his chess friends when they lived in Marseille, a rabbi who’d served two years in prison on a charge of money laundering for a Colombian drug cartel, once asked Tooly what sort of war Humphrey had had. “He’s a Jewish person from Europe,” the rabbi noted. “He’s the right age. In my community, you often don’t know what sort of a war they had till after they die. Then someone mentions something at the funeral.”

But Humphrey had not suffered the worst horrors of that period, had certainly never been in a Nazi camp. He said dryly, “I did not have privilege of going through Hitler holocaust.” Whatever had happened, he remained after the war in the Soviet Union, where he grew to adulthood with increasing disenchantment toward the government, his wisecracking ultimately leading to a stint in jail. Subsequently, he escaped the USSR, ending up in South Africa after a fool advised him to stow away on the wrong ship. This young intellectual of the Russian-Jewish tradition found himself at the southern tip of Africa, surrounded by the dim-witted cruelty of the apartheid regime. He couldn’t stand it, so left, and traveled the world. Uprooted, transient, and with the wrong mother tongue, he never achieved much. As Humphrey put it, he’d been “cornered by history.” That is, his youthful intent to consort with the Great Thinkers had been destroyed by the idiocy of his era.

“I must talk to you,” he reiterated. He found a near-empty bottle of vodka in the freezer, emptied the last drops into a wineglass, inhaled its fumes. At the Ping-Pong table, he bounced a ball.

“Well, talk.”

“You think I joking,” he said, and downed his vodka. “But I am worry. Something can happen to you. Very soon.”

“Yes, yes, I know — disaster if we don’t run off together.”

Humphrey fetched the empty vodka bottle, miming as if to wring it for another drop. He drank modestly — rarely more than a single shot — and disdained drunkenness, which he considered the domain of trivial beings. Today, however, he needed another slug, so ventured into the Brooklyn night for more vodka. “When I come back,” he pledged, “I have important items to tell you.”

“I’m on tenterhooks.”

“You don’t going anywhere.”

“Won’t.”

Minutes later, the buzzer rang — he must have forgotten his keys.

But it was a woman whose voice crackled over the intercom. “Helloooo! Anybody there?”

Amazing: she just followed them, wherever in the world they went.

“Ahoy,” Tooly answered, and held down the button to spring the building door.

Regally, Sarah Pastore entered, kissing Tooly on the head and embracing her with a rub of the back, after which she twirled her cherry-red dyed hair, piling it up, then letting it cascade down her back. She pointed to her right cheek, directing Tooly to plant a peck into the bull’s-eye center, which she did. “Cute as ever,” Sarah said, sizing up Tooly.

The same was not true of Sarah. She was a worn forty-two, her proportions out of proportion, bony nose almost manly, the fedora self-consciously eccentric now rather than sexy. For years, she’d been an eternal twentysomething. Now Tooly had reached that decade herself and inadvertently chased Sarah from it.

“How long’s this stopover?” Tooly asked, and placed another kiss on Sarah’s cheek, more firmly now, as if to impress there the affection she struggled to summon.

“Tra-la-LA-la, DEE-DUM. Tra-la-LA-la, DEE-DUM,” Sarah sang, striding away to explore this latest abode. “Who can say?” Sarah was a recurrent feature of their lives, residing with Tooly and Humphrey for spells, even traveling with them. But months could pass without word of her. Then Venn took pity, apprised her of their latest whereabouts — and there she was.

“What brings you this time?”

Sarah sang, “Happy birthday to you/Squashed tomatoes and stew/You look like a monkey/And you smell like one, too.” She took out a cigarette. “You’re turning twenty-one soon.”

“I’m aware.”

“Where’s Rumpledstiltskin?”

“Out buying supplies.”

“And everyone else?” By this she meant Venn. “Don’t know why, but the birthday song has been tra-la-LA-la-DEE-DUMing in my head ever since I was at this department store on Madison and Sixty-first. What’s that place, the expensive one?”

“No idea,” Tooly said. “My clothes originate from a slightly lower class of shop.”

“You know what we’ll do?” she said, taking Tooly by the wrists. “Go on a shopping spree. Your birthday present from me. Shall we?”

“But paying for things, please.”

“Of course paying for things. What are you even talking about?” She considered Tooly’s outfit: pajamas with a motif of racehorses, collar buttoned to the top, dressing gown. “It’s a crime to leave you to your own devices. In pajamas at — what time is it?”

“Yes, what time is it?”