“So group or no group, Boom, I want to say there’s some that wouldn’t have done it. Because I need to be able to say, Not me either. And not your cobber Rocky, I’d hope. And maybe not those American kids who were in service here and who’d been taught better, and didn’t come up listening to all the rellies spilling bilge about the Mohammedan monsters who’d done bad to their ancestors for centuries.”
I drained my soda. After that story there was not a lot more to say, and I waited in silence for him to finish his beer. He was leaving in the morning for a long weekend in Belgium, and we agreed to reconnoiter on Monday in The Hague. Then I went upstairs to start on the e-mails that had accumulated over two days, hoping that work would help me shake off the horror of what Goos had described. Evil of that magnitude was like a dead star, sucking all the light out of life.
I was over my tablet about half an hour, when I heard a light rap on my door. I expected that Goos had forgotten to mention something, but when I opened, Esma was on my threshold. She seemed to have refreshed her makeup and run a comb through her huge nest of hair, and I was taken again by how striking she was. But her expression was all business.
“Might you have one second, Bill?”
I stepped aside to welcome her. I offered her my desk chair and took a seat on the bed. I asked if she’d like something from the tiny minibar, which held tepid beer and water, but she declined.
“I won’t be a minute,” she said. “But something has come up with Ferko that I know you’d want to hear.” She’d told him what Sinfi had said about Kajevic’s threats. “He acted as if he was only now remembering it, but he agreed that story had indeed run through the camp. I wasn’t pleased, and he could see as much, but he claimed he’d never connected the concerns about Kajevic to the night of April 27 because the Chetniks weren’t speaking Serbian.”
“Are you convinced by that?”
“I count it as possible but not likely. My suspicion is that he was terrified to mention Kajevic’s name.”
That made sense. Ferko would not have been the first witness to go skinny on the truth out of fear. And while he may have misled Esma, he hadn’t lied in his testimony or his prior statements submitted to the Court. Still, I was concerned. If Ferko was trying to leave out Kajevic, he might have also altered other details, and that could trench on perjury.
“We’re going to need another go at him, Esma.”
“I understand. But may I suggest waiting a bit? See where your investigation leads and what other questions you might have. He’s reluctant as is, and he keeps asking me to promise that he’s done with this. We don’t need him doing an about-turn and refusing to cooperate at all.”
Overall, I thought her advice was good.
“Thank you for letting us know,” I said.
She nodded and stood. From her feet, she gave me another of her long looks. She was holding on to something, deliberating, and abruptly sat again, this time beside me on the bed.
“The other reason you’ll need to wait to speak to Ferko is that I’ve just explained to him that I shall no longer be his representative with the Court. When you want to see him again, the Victims and Witnesses people can ring him and, if need be, arrange for other counsel. I now have no connection whatsoever to this case.”
She watched me as I gathered the import of what she’d said. The directness of her huge eyes on me was like staring into a leveled rifle—if a rifle could express yearning.
“Is that for my sake?” I asked.
“Well, Bill,” she said, with a cute smile, “I rather hope it is for mine.” With two fingers, she took hold of the necktie I’d been wearing all day in a silly effort to look official and whispered, “Bill, do you know the literal translation of the Romany words for desire? ‘I eat you.’ Not ‘I want you.’ ‘I eat you.’ Or more poetically, ‘I’ll devour you.’”
She leaned in slowly and kissed me, not in a grazing or tentative fashion, but delivering her entire self to me in the process. That and the full soft weight of her breasts against me were electrifying. I realized that at some level I had known what was going to happen, whatever my excuses, the minute she came into this room. I was sure she could feel my heart flopping around with the desperation of a landed fish.
“Allow yourself, Bill,” she murmured. “You will never know yourself completely unless you have lived the moment when there is nothing of you but pleasure.”
With my tie still between her fingers, she drew me to her, while I confronted yet again the weight of being well into the second half of my life. The ‘Somedays’ accumulated through youth and middle age had become a collection in their own right, a wish list illuminating the boundaries between fantasy and life’s many limitations, with their unintended cruelty. ‘Someday I will learn to scuba dive.’ ‘Someday I will travel to Bhutan.’ ‘Someday I will quit my job and take up woodworking.’ ‘Someday I will clean up…my office…my closet, the garage, the storeroom, the boxes I never looked at after my mother died.’ ‘Someday I will learn to fly-fish.’ ‘Go back to the piano.’ ‘Someday I will live in Tuscany.’ ‘Someday I will live in Tuscany and read the works of Beckett and Erving Goffman.’
After fifty-four years, the Someday pile had become mountainous—and with it, the inevitable recognition that almost none of it would occur. Having lived well, I felt little bitterness in knowing that. But in the moment, how can you turn away when Someday can suddenly be real?
‘Someday I will be with a woman like that, someone who somehow jolts an entire room by passing through the doorway.’ In how many rooms, gazing at how many doorways, had that utterly impossible promise strobed through my mind, a commitment made largely so I could do the polite thing and look away?
Perhaps all Merriwell had meant to tell me—Merriwell and his many cohorts who’d been dragged down by the tidal pull of desire—was that at a certain age the bitterest of all emotions is regret.
IV.
For the Record
14.
Records—April 16–23
Life had taught me a cold truth, that the long-savored dream, when tested by reality, rarely approached expectations. That was never so in Esma’s bed.
Despite the porn sites and Internet postings that vividly document the outward doings, none of us will ever really know the internal experience of other humans at these moments. But the extremes of physical pleasure I experienced with Esma were new for me. Whether that was Gypsy magic or because I’d checked all inhibitions when I crossed a professional boundary I still should have observed, at instants I felt I had reached the kernel of life, a place where sensation was so intense that the rest of the world became remote and living was purely a thrill.
Each encounter was novel, starting from the first time, while she was thrown over the arm of another of those beautiful leather chairs in my room. There were never any bars or borders, only whim and inspiration. Usually, Esma engaged in a constant narration, a virtual play-by-play in the most profane and arousing terms—‘Oh yes, look at that big thing. Oh yes. I’m going to touch it, would you like that, yes, you know how much you like that, does that please you, yes it pleases you so much’—that gave way now and then to whispered instructions about her own satisfaction. ‘There, slowly, please. Please.’ ‘Pinch.’ ‘Hard.’ ‘Harder.’
But better than the ballet maneuvers and machinery to which Esma introduced me, she offered an example in how to revel in desire and its satisfaction. She was remarkably free with her exclamations, and with the earthquake of pleasure that jolted her body with startling frequency. She turned the bed into a delicious, soupy mess, and yet always wanted more, reminding me of another unique truth about sex: You can see the Grand Canyon, exult in its majesty, and strike it off the bucket list. But everyone wants the next orgasm.
Naked, Esma was an inspiration, even though her Rubenesque proportions were not favored in our era. As we undressed one another the first time, she suddenly picked up her silk dress from the bed and draped it across herself, just as her bra was about to slip away.
“Do you like large breasts, Bill?”
“Love them,” I said.