Tom Rachman - The Rise & Fall of Great Powers

SATELLITE IMAGES SHOWED the swirling eye of Hurricane Irene inching up the Eastern Seaboard. The authorities warned of flooding, a shutdown of mass transit servicing New York City, a state of emergency across the region. “It’s going to be up to individuals to get out of their own areas,” Mayor Bloomberg announced on television, ordering the evacuation of high-risk zones, including where Humphrey lived in Sheepshead Bay.

He was asleep when she opened the door to his room. Someone — Humphrey couldn’t recall who — had run tape in X’s across each windowpane to stop the glass from shattering during the storm. The rest of the room seemed to have been visited by a hurricane already: books everywhere, dirty clothing strewn about, used cups and plates on the floor. Yelena had left town, stuffing Humphrey’s bar fridge with ready-to-eat meals before departing. He had helped himself to a few, but thrown out none of the refuse, nor washed himself or shaved in a few days. Tooly spent two hours restoring order, helped him to the bathroom, cleaned him, returned him to his armchair. Mentioning Venn hardly stirred Humphrey, while references to the coming hurricane puzzled him.

As he slept that afternoon, she went through his documents. She discarded junk mail, then organized his bills by date. It didn’t take long to find the bank statements. As she put them in order, she found payments in each of the cities she had passed through during the preceding decade, including one final transaction from a few years earlier, the transfer of the remaining balance to the Mintons in Caergenog. “You,” she said when he awoke, “were the one helping me. My magic bank account.”

He frowned — waking was always hard for him. Forty minutes later, the statements still lay in his lap.

“Why did you give me all that?” she asked. “It was all you had left, wasn’t it. And I was so stupid with it. As far as I’m concerned, the shop belongs to you. It’s not worth much. But I’ll sell it, or try to. Whatever I get is yours. And we can move you somewhere decent. Okay?”

“You went lots of places,” he said, gazing down at the bank statements.

“Did you read those to know where I was?”

“I thought of you doing things.”

“And I thought of you, Humph. Often, I did.”

“I wasn’t doing anything worth thinking about.”

She took his hand.

“You have a bookshop!” he declared. “You really are my dream girl! I imagine you there, ringing up all the sales.”

“We don’t make many, I’m afraid.”

“You,” he said, “are the favorite thing I did in my life. Even if I didn’t make you.”

“Don’t say things like that.” She blinked. “Look, you have to come see the shop. Wouldn’t that be nice? Let me describe it for you.” She gave her best portrait of the village, the former pub that contained World’s End, the first editions, the snug at the back, and her lone employee. “You’d enjoy Fogg; you two would get on so well. I can imagine you having debates for hours on end.”

Humphrey gave a short nod, by which he communicated that this trip would remain only a fancy. “I’m in the same place as my favorite person I knew. For nearly all of existence, before and after now — nearly all of it — I don’t get to be with you. But now I am. I even helped you a bit in your life.”

“You helped me so much.”

“I don’t remember everything that happened in my life,” he said, frowning. “Parts, I do.”

Ever since her first visit to Sheepshead Bay, he’d been beset by these fragments — his past flickering, repetitive but incomplete. She’d been able to help only by replaying anecdotes he had previously recounted. But now she did know his story. “Venn explained all about your life,” she said. “Shall I tell you?”

“All right,” he said, looking blindly past her. As Humphrey listened, he squinted at the X’s on the window. Tooly had seen him exert himself before — when Mac visited, for example. “Do your best,” she urged him. “Tell me if this sounds right.”

She went on, watching him, his eyes closed tightly with concentration. At times, he specified that he just couldn’t recall this bit, or interrupted with small corrections. At other points, he added details she’d never known. Mostly, he paid attention.

His mother, Tooly began, was born at the turn of the century into a middle-class Jewish family from Pressburg, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The family spoke many languages, but their first tongue was German. As a young girl, she had aspired to a creative life, to act and paint. And by her late teens she frequented artistic circles, where she fell for an aspiring actor, a Russian Jew who had left Leningrad to make a name for himself in the West. But his career was hampered by stage fright, worsened by his thick accent. He decided to write and direct instead, but the fragile confidence that had undermined his performances foiled his offstage career, too. He was an endearing nebbish, though, so she married him, telling her parents only after the union was legal.

Her husband proved inept at earning and, increasingly dispirited, he drifted into radical leftist politics. To support them, she took work as a seamstress, producing costumes for local productions, while auditioning for parts herself. When she became pregnant with their first child, her father — a doctor — exhorted them to cease these theatrical pursuits; her husband must start contributing. He took work at a jewelry shop, whose customers he privately referred to as “bourgeois stone collectors.” The workers of the world would rise against capitalist modes of production, he informed his wife, since history was inevitable. Exploitation and greed could not be the fate of the species.

Their first child, a daughter, was born with a kidney ailment. Three years later, they bore a boy whom they did not call Humphrey Ostropoler, but who decades later adopted that name. The family, in the grip of revolutionary ardor, became communal farmers. Doing so at the start of the Depression was not an inspired plan. Scenes from those years remained with Humphrey: the milk cow at the bottom of the garden; the orchard where he and his sister had stolen apricots when starving; how he threw a pit that struck her in the eye.

Humphrey grew, but his sister remained stunted. At age five, he was the taller, though she was the elder by three years. Doctors drove syringes into her, dosed her with powders, cut her apart. When she writhed in bed, her mother stood on one side, her father on the other, Humphrey holding her feet. “Help me,” she whispered. “Please, help me.” They placed iced facecloths on her forehead, which at least gave them a sense of doing something.

His sister died at age eleven. She had feared being forgotten, but the opposite proved true. Humphrey gained a doubleness of experience, incapable of fitting through the narrow doors beyond which others lived, being two people now. He still refused to say her name. But, his whole life, he saw his sister in any little girl, and wondered what she’d have become, had she lasted the nearly unimaginable seventy-five years since her disappearance.

Humphrey’s father gave up ideology after his daughter’s death. He resumed work at the jewelry store, no longer moaning about the clients. His wife, by contrast, adopted his former political fervor and intended to act on it. Reports circulated about arable land in the Soviet Union, available to committed foreigners. Her husband had left the USSR as a young man, and resisted returning. She pressed him daily, citing the tumult in Austria, where Dollfuss turned the nation into a Fascist state, and in Germany, where Hitler had taken power. Nazis in both countries agitated for unification, which would put the Reich at their doorstep. It was time to go East.