Libra - Don Delillo [52]
He sat in the TV room watching reruns of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Reitmeyer came in to shake his hand. Half a dozen other guys dropped by to ask about the brig. He wore his Hawaiian shirt, smirking a little, telling them he’d breezed right through. Great training for life in the U.S. Gives you that competitive edge. That’s Ozzie for you, said his barracks-mates. That’s the Rabbit, that’s Bugs, and they drifted out one by one, leaving him to stare at the high-school boys and girls shuffling drowsily on a dance floor in Philadelphia.
Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers’ village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.
He entered a tenement and looked in an open door to a flat where a young man was trying to fix a mimeograph machine. Konno had told him to go to the fourth floor but hadn’t supplied an apartment number. The hallway was dark and rank. A child was wailing on one of the upper stories.
Hidell climbs the ancient creaking stairs.
On four, two more doors were open. Students milled inside the apartments, moved from one to the other. A young man looked at Ozzie, who was standing in the hallway, smiling, in his T-shirt and dusty jeans. The man smiled back and pointed to a door at the end of the hall. Oswald knocked and was told to enter. He saw a tatami mat and low table. A woman moved across the room. She was about fifty years old, with a moon face and pixie hairdo, wearing a light cotton kimono. She said her name was Dr. Braunfels. She taught German and Russian on a private basis to students at Tokyo University. She understood he was interested in learning Russian. He said he was, and waited. She sat cross-legged on the mat at the far side of the table. She asked him to take off his shoes. These were the nice little gestures that went with the setting.
She wore eye makeup that matched the pale-blue shade of the kimono. He hadn’t expected a European. It was encouraging, it was all to the good, it made his decision seem timely, fixed to favorable circumstances. She was probably important, an adviser to radical students and a recruiting officer or handler of agents. She gestured for him to sit facing her on the mat. She watched him assume the awkward position. They ate rice cakes wrapped in seaweed.
“And you are Oswald, Lee,” she said finally, as if correcting an imbalance, adding the last stately note to some diplomatic exchange.
There were bamboo shades behind her, a screen to one side. The ceiling was low, a dark-toned wood. Small polished objects here and there. You were supposed to appreciate the near-bareness, the placement of things. Twigs in a vase on the lacquer table.
He told her he wanted to defect.
“I’ve been thinking this is the step to take, that I’ll never be able to live in the U. S. I want a life like these students, political, working in the struggle. I’m not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams. I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. I do think there is something unique about the Soviet Union that I wish to find out for myself. It’s the great theory come to life. Before I was fifteen I began indoctrinating myself in the New Orleans library. I studied Marxist ideology. I could lift my head from a book and see the impoverishment of the