Libra - Don Delillo [107]
“It’s a humiliation to me,” George said, “that I am sitting in a room with not a single Negro here.”
“To face blind hatred and discrimination.”
“Kennedy is trying to make the shift. Painfully slow but he’s doing it. It’s humiliating tome that I can’t befriend a Negro without consequences among my friends or in my profession. I live in University Park. We are incorporated, a township. If a Negro family tries to move in, the township buys the house at two or three times its value. The family disappears, goodbye, like magic.”
“Look at the anti-Kennedy feeling here.”
“Poisonous. Young Dallas matrons tell the most vicious jokes. Their eyes light up in the strangest way. It’s clear to me they want him dead.”
George went across the room to embrace an elderly man and woman. Lee found himself smiling at the scene. He watched people steer through the room, holding plates of food before them. A man offered Marina a cigarette from a black-and-white case. Lee had his collection. He’d written to an obscure press in New York for a twenty-five-cent booklet called The Teachings of Leon Trotsky. Back comes a letter saying it’s out of print. At least they sent a letter. He saved their letters. The point is they are out there and willing to reply. He was starting a collection of documents.
She would never refuse a cigarette.
He planned to write to the Socialist Workers Party for information about their aims and policies. Trotsky is the pure form. It was satisfying to send away and get this obscure stuff in the mail. It was a channel to sympathetic souls, a secret and a power. It gave him a breadth and reach beyond the life of the bungalow and the welding company.
She is the type that doesn’t refuse. It is thrilling to her to be given things. She will take your cigarettes, money, paper clips, postage stamps, whatever you want to give her. There is a certain woman that glows at the smallest gift.
Trotsky’s name was Bronstein.
Half a bungalow on an unpaved street. He slept next to his Junie, fanning her with a magazine in the middle of the night.
When George came back he did a curious thing. He moved his chair around and sat facing Lee, with his back to the room. He had a hanky folded to a point in his breast pocket. His tie was brown.
“Now, what I am talking about is having you show me these notes of yours, whatever condition they are in, because it is Minsk and I am interested.”
“It is also the system. The whole sense of historic ideas being corrupted by the system.”
“Good, wonderful, you must let me see.”
“It isn’t all typed yet,” Lee said.
“Typed. I will have it typed. Please, this is the least of your worries. ”
“It’s called ‘The Kollective.’ I did serious research. I read journals and analyzed the whole economy.”
“Is there anything else? Because I would like to see anything at all from that period. Observations of the most innocent type. What people wear. Show me everything.”
“Why?”
“Okay I will tell you why. It is really very simple. In recent years I have been approached a number of times about my travels abroad. It is strictly routine. In other words you went to such-and-such, Mr. de Mohrenschildt, and we’d like to know what did you see, who did you meet, what is the layout of the factory you toured and so on. It is routine intelligence that thousands of travelers every year say okay this is what I saw. It is called the Domestic Contacts Division and there is a man who asked me to talk to you strictly low-key, friendly, of the CIA, and this is what I am doing. He is a good fellow, reasonable fellow, so on. I am always traveling, I am always coming back, and when I come back there is Mr. Collings on my doorstep and we have a chat, low-key, with drinks. I have written things on my trips which I give him willingly and I have given things to the State Department because this is my philosophy, Lee, that I must take on the coloration, let us say, of the place where I am living and earning my income at the particular time. A country is like