The Greek fleet had to set sail for Troy to retrieve the faithless Helen, and so the angry goddess Artemis had to be appeased so that she would allow a fair wind to blow, and so Iphigenia daughter of Agamemnon had to be sacrificed, and so her grieving mother Clytemnestra, Helen’s sister, would wait until her husband returned from the war and would then murder him, and so their son Orestes would avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother, and so the Furies would pursue Orestes, and so on. Tragedy was the arrival in human affairs of the inexorable, which might be external (a family curse) or internal (a character flaw) but in either case events would take their inescapable course. But it was at least a part of human nature to contest the idea of the inexorable, even though other words for tragedy’s superforce, destiny, kismet, karma, fate, were so powerful in every tongue. It was at least a part of human nature to insist on human agency and will, and to believe that the irruption into human affairs of chance was a better explanation for the failures of that agency and will than a predestined and irresistible pattern inherent in the narrative. The antic clothing of the absurd, the idea of the meaninglessness of life, was a more attractive philosophical garment to many of us than the tragedian’s somber robes, which, when worn, became both the evidence and the agents of doom. But it was also an aspect of human nature—just as powerful a characteristic of the contradictory human animal as its opposite—fatalistically to accept that there was indeed a natural order of things, and uncomplainingly to play the cards you were dealt.
Two urns of human ash on Nero Golden’s desk: was this tragic inexorability at work, or a dreadful, doubly random misfortune? And the demented Joker out there, swinging from the Empire State Building with his greedy eye on the White House: was he the consequence of an extraordinary concatenation of unpredictable mischances, or the product of eight years and more of public shamelessness of which he was the embodiment and apogee? Tragedy or chance? And were there escape routes for the family and the country, or was it wiser to sit back and accept one’s fate?
Nero Golden spent hours each day alone at his desk gazing upon the ashes of his sons, interrogating them for answers. To lessen his sadness Vasilisa brought him news of little Vespasian’s development, his first words, his first steps, but the old man was inconsolable. “I look at him, I look at Petya, I wonder, which of them is next,” he said. Vasilisa responded to this strongly. “As for my son, he is safe,” she said. “I will protect him with my life and he will grow up to be a strong and excellent man.” He looked up at her from his seat with a certain milky disapproval, but also vulnerability, even weakness in his gaze. “And my Petya,” he said. “Will you not protect him too?” She came to put a hand on his shoulder. “I think Petya’s crisis is already past,” she said. “The worst has happened and he is still with us and he will be better again, as he was before.”
“For the sons to die before the father,” he said. “It is as if the night falls when the sun is still in the sky.”
“Your house has a new sun shining upon it, a fine young prince,” she told him, “so the day ahead is bright.”
The summer was over. The weeks of heat wave declined toward cloudy humidity. The city buzzed with the usual September magic, its annual fall reincarnation, but Suchitra and I were in Telluride for the film festival; our series of interviews about classic movie moments had added up to a pretty good documentary, The Best Bits, featuring some impressive talking heads discussing the film scenes they loved most—not only Werner Herzog but also Emir Kusturica, Michael Haneke, Jane Campion, Kathryn Bigelow, Doris D?rrie, David Cronenberg, and, in his last interview, the sadly departed Abbas Kiarostami—and we had been selected to bring it to the prestigious Labor Day weekend feast of cinema in the Colorado mountains, in the town where Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid held up their first bank, and the benign (and not so benign) spirits of Chuck Jones and his dwatted wabbit and his daffy duck watched over us all. Even there, in that cinéaste Eden, the talk occasionally turned to the dead, in that year when the Starman, the Purple One, the Deer Hunter, Young Frankenstein (“that’s ‘Fraankensteen’!”), R2D2, the Bird on the Wire, and the Greatest had all taken their leave. But we had the movies—La La Land, Arrival, Manchester by the Sea—to occupy our minds and eyes, so death took a back seat at least while the festival was running, because real life, as we all well understood, was immortal, real life was the deathless stuff shining in the darkness up there on the silver screen.
Back in the city, in a state of considerable elation because of the good reception of our film at Telluride, I went to offer my respects to Nero, thinking also to invite him to the Russian Tea Room for vodka and blinis, to repay him for his boozy solicitude after my orphaning. I confess I was altogether too cheerfully high on our triumph in the Rockies, and may not have tried hard enough to adopt an appropriately mournful demeanor in that house of multiple calamities, but when I entered the Golden residence to find the great Nero in the living room taking tea, served on the best household china, with the ranting apocalyptic hobo who had reminded me of Klaus Kinski, and apparently taking the fellow’s babbling seriously, I failed, I admit it, to suppress a laugh, because this cut-price Fitzcarraldo, who had put on a battered top hat for the occasion and who was slurping his tea noisily from a rare Meissen porcelain cup, now also bore a striking resemblance to the Mad Hatter, and Nero, leaning intently toward him, made an adequate March Hare.
My laugh caused Kinski to draw himself up in what I understood from my long familiarity with the works of P. G. Wodehouse to be high dudgeon. “I amuse you?” he inquired as severely as one of Bertie Wooster’s formidable aunts. I waved my hands, no, no, not at all, and controlled myself.