The American Ambassador

272 Pages·2009·1.16 MB·English

by  Just Ward

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Prologue
PART ONE
1
2
3
4
5
PART TWO
1
2
3
4
5
PART THREE
1
2
3
4
PART FOUR
1
2
3
4
About the Author
FIRST MARINER BOOKS EDITION 2003

Copyright © 1987 by Ward Just
All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park
Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:
Just, Ward S.
The American ambassador.
“A Richard Todd book”—
p. cm.
ISBN 0-395-42694-4
ISBN 0-618-34078-5 (pbk.)
I. Title.
PS3560.U75A79 1987 813'.54 86-20126

eISBN 978-0-544-32660-6
v1.0214

An excerpt from this book originally appeared in the Winter 1986 issue of
TriQuarterly, a publication of Northwestern University.

The quotation from Dylan Thomas’s “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,”
on [>], is from Poems of Dylan Thomas. Copyright © 1952 by Dylan Thomas.
Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.
TO SARAH
Prologue
YOU ASKED ME about their corruption. The occasions that come most easily to
mind are Thanksgivings. You don’t have them where you come from. They’re
an American tradition begun, oh, three hundred and fifty years ago; more. A
feast to celebrate the harvest after the killer winter of 1621. Something about
Thanksgiving brought out their decay, the utter carelessness and ignorance with
which they view the world. Giving thanks, they were at their most sentimental.
Of course it was the ambassador’s favorite holiday. He always proposed the
same toast, a quotation from Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It may seem strange
that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread
from the sweat of other men’s faces. . . .
Strange indeed, my angel.
Thanksgiving 1979, we were in Paris. Halfway through dinner he had an
inspiration. He thought we needed a history lesson, mother and me. We’d take a
couple of days and visit some of the War One cemeteries and monuments.
Mother looked at him in surprise and said in her sarcastic way, Oh, great!
Grrrreat! That means she thinks it’s a terrific idea; it’s the way they talk to each
other, always have. He leaned across the table, his fat mouth full of French
turkey, and looked at me. I suppose he thought we could be boys together. But I
looked back at him with no expression at all and shrugged, Whatever you say.
Whenever I do that, it irritates the shit out of him. He thought for a minute and
said that if we would bear with him for a couple of days, then he’d agree to stop
for the night near Épernay and we could drink Champagne with dinner. Mother
laughed and said, Right on! Their solution to everything is to have an expensive
meal and drink Champagne.
We set out a few days later in an embassy car. I would have liked to beg off,
but I didn’t have any money; and he wouldn’t give me any, even if I had asked,
which of course I would never do. And in a way, I didn’t mind going, to see how
he would approach it. How the ambassador’s moral vision would cope with the
Western Front. Nothing’s left to the imagination, and I wondered what he’d say,
standing in the cold surrounded by gravestones. He has a theory about
everything.
My angel, we are in your part of the world. So bring the killing grounds into
your mind’s eye: the low hills, the sudden valleys, the irregular woods, the milky
sky. It’s cold, you can see your breath. Observe him, a tallish American, slightly
stooped. He thinks of himself as one of them, for he, too, has known battle,
having been a casualty; an incident in Africa, years before. He was wounded
having been a casualty; an incident in Africa, years before. He was wounded
then and as a result his back gives him trouble. His wife stands beside him. You
know immediately that they are married, and have been married for many years.
There is similarity in their postures: she, too, looks slightly stooped. He is
talking and she is looking at him, her head cocked; she is smiling, even though
nothing he is saying is amusing. She touches his arm and they walk off together,
alone.
We went first to the Somme Cemetery, fourteen acres, 1837 dead. Then we
went to the Aisne-Marne Cemetery, forty-two acres, 2288 dead. The Aisne-
Marne is near Belleau Wood, and he insisted that we walk through that. He
bought a guidebook so that we could understand the flow of the battle. “Flow of
the battle,” his words; the great river of Western civilization. On the way to the
Oise-Aisne Cemetery—thirty-six acres, 6012 dead—we stopped at the Château-
Thierry monument, built by the same firm that built Washington, D.C., chunks
of marble piled one on top of the other. It looked like a Roman ruin that you’d
find in Palestine or Libya. All rectangles, except for an occasional pillar;
imperialist realism. He was driving like a madman and near dark we got to the
Meuse-Argonne Cemetery. Bow your heads, ladies and gentlemen. Say a prayer.
This was the greatest boneyard of them all, one hundred and thirty acres! A
grave every three and a half feet! 13,246 stiffs.
In ten hours we’d seen twenty-five thousand graves, an infantry division of
dead. Superb. It was really superb. All those white crosses, and bones under each
cross. No monuments to the civilians, however; this was exclusively for the
soldiers, and the higher the rank, the gaudier the monument. One of them
reminded me of the bell tower at my old school in Massachusetts, bought and
paid for by an alumnus, a Boston banker. Banker’s Tower, a hundred and fifty
feet high; it looked like a one-hundred-and-fifty-foot hard-on. It was where we
beat the shit out of that English teacher, that time I told you about, Mel’s
revenge. These reminded me of that. Same thing, same thing exactly. I looked at
the plots and wondered if it was true that the hair and fingernails continue to
grow, while the brain, testicles, liver, heart, and eyes become dust. There were
people here and there at the Meuse-Argonne Cemetery, old people standing
around at attention. A tableau vivant, the ambassador called it. I imagined the
ground beginning to move, caving and splitting, releasing a gust of noxious gas,
and the corpses rising in a great wail, all bones and hair and nails, and all of us
dancing, a boogie of our own time; all of us locked in an embrace.
Can’t you see it?
Back in the embassy car, she took the wheel. He was reading some book and
quoting passages about how the British troops were playing cricket at Flanders
while the shells flew overhead. They played cricket listening to the explosions
while the shells flew overhead. They played cricket listening to the explosions
and the screams of their comrades. Haw, haw, those English. Well bowled,
Wilfred! Dinka-doo, baby. It was pathetic. And by then we’d gotten away from
Épernay, so he didn’t get his great meal with the wine of the region. That was
the good part. They drank Champagne of course but it wasn’t the same because
it wasn’t the wine of the region.
I said it sounded to me like blood was the wine of the region.
You have a point, son, the ambassador said.
They never shut up during dinner. They talked about the cemeteries and
monuments we’d seen, and what the Great War meant. They talked as if it ought
to have some great meaning, something beyond itself, an epiphany, boomlay
boomlay boomlay boom. But I couldn’t understand what they thought it was,
except the simple fact that a couple of million sons of bitches died for empire.
The ambassador said, The nineteenth century died, right here on the Western
Front. Uh-huh. They are not very original people, the ambassador and his wife;
the ambassador drops centuries the way other people drop names. The British
upper crust, he said; their ruling class destroyed, a generation lost. I thought,
What a darn shame. All those la-di-da peers, dead in the mud. Oh, dear. Well, it
was their empire. Why shouldn’t they die for it? No tears, please.
Well, I said, why did it happen?
I wanted him to explain it to me, as best he could. He’d read so much about it,
it’s like a hobby with him, stamp collecting, furniture making, the Great War.
The library in the house on O Street is filled with books on the First War. A few
of them discuss the economic causes, and I thought he might address those.
Assign some weight, give them specific gravity. For instance, Who profited? But
he didn’t say anything about it. He seemed to feel that fate played a hand. He
said, Arrogance, ignorance. Things went out of control.
And they wanted it so badly, he said.
I just looked at him. It was the only thing he’d said all day long that made any
sense, though not the sense that he intended.
Next day. Verdun. A three-star graveyard, worth a journey. Six months of
fighting, a quarter of a million dead. Cold as shit, north wind, rain, and fog, an
ideal day to view the remains. We walked through the Ossuaire, then out again.
They just looked, didn’t say much. I kept the conversation going, determined to
be light. I was reading from the guidebook, the circumstances of the legend of
the Tranchée des Baionettes, an infantry regiment buried by German artillery,
only the ends of their rifle barrels and bayonets visible at the end. You don’t
want to hear about it, French nostalgia. La gloire.
I was reading aloud, and suddenly saw myself in the trench. What would I
have done? I continued to read automatically, but I was imagining the smoke and
have done? I continued to read automatically, but I was imagining the smoke and
the flame, and the explosions, the officers’ shouts. I was thinking of the
Ukrainian Machno, Lenin’s friend. Everyone loved Machno. No one dared
attack Machno, even in 1918 when the Russians were slaughtering each other,
and no one was safe. Machno’s austere slogan: “Kill all civil servants. Kill them
without prejudice, no matter what party they belong to or what government gave
them their posts.” I closed the book and watched them walk away a little
distance. He was more stooped than usual. Mother had her arm around his waist
and was talking earnestly at him, her there-there now-now tone. His head was
bowed and he kept nodding. When I approached, they walked off again; a
classified conversation.
Of course I knew what it was about. He had been silent all morning, after
seeing the paper. A new development in Teheran, the Revolutionary Guards
were getting nasty. They were threatening the lives of Americans! Obviously he
knew many of the people in the embassy, the ones taken hostage—though
hostage is a strange term for people whose job it was to spy, no more and no
less, who invented the tyrant Pahlevi, installed him as shah, paid him, armed
him, and advised him, lawyer to client. I would call them prisoners of war. The
idea seemed to be that they were neutrals, only carrying out the orders of the
President via the Department of State, that they were somehow immune and not
to be held responsible for their actions. They were excused. Weird. I watched
them talk, muttering at each other. She had both hands on his chest, and then she
kissed him. Her hair glistened with rain. Then I heard his deep voice, raised for a
moment. Those assholes, he said. I turned away, laughing. Did he really think
that was what they were? He could see no farther than the men’s locker room,
the perfect Bourbon prince. Nothing learned, nothing forgotten. Machno,
Machno. I began to laugh again. Where are you now that we need you?

Verdun was the last of the battlefields, though naturally when you are touring in
that part of Europe you cannot avoid them; they are as common as vineyards.
But now he only noted the signs; we did not “go in.” We moved easily from War
One to War Two, meandering north. We passed within a few miles of Waterloo,
but no one said anything. They talked in the front seat, I read or dozed in the
rear. I remember one little bit of conversation regarding the great crisis.
She said, “What are they going to do?”
The ambassador said, “The time for doing something is past.”
“Well, they can’t do nothing.”
He said, “Yes, they can. They let it get to a point where they can only play the
cards they have. There won’t be another deal. And it’s a nothing hand.”