Lucky Bastard by Charles McCarry Page A

ate them with her fingers. She ate her fried potatoes, even her salad, in the same way. Jack recognized the style: He knew a lot of bourgeois Movement girls who had adopted infantile table manners along with round heels as a means of semaphoring radical political beliefs. He himself used a knife and fork in the American manner—cutting a morsel of sausage, putting down his knife, shifting his fork from left hand to right, spearing the food, lifting it to his mouth, chewing thirty-two times before swallowing. This unmistakable evidence of Jack’s revolting nationality further disgusted Greta.
    While they ate, Manfred carried on a dialectical discussion with Jack. The subject, inescapably, was politics—American politics as seen from the Left. At first, Manfred’s questions were condescending, and he only half-listened to Jack’s replies. But before long he began to realize that these answers were subtle, deeply informed, and, most surprising, free of cant. Jack was no fervent youth, unsure of his opinions and eager for approval. He did not protest the correctness of his own beliefs, or even bother to describe them. Nevertheless the listener felt that Jack’s political convictions were so pure, so deep, so genuinely held, that he felt no need to announce them, even on first meeting. He seemed to assume, while offering no bona fides that this was the case, that Manfred would take it for granted that he believed in all the right things. This was an amazing trick of the mind.
    Quite soon Jack turned what had started out to be a Socratic dialogue with himself as the learner into a tutorial on American realities—a monologue that rushed along like a river in flood, swelling as it went, picking up all sorts of strange debris. Jack was calm, collected, good-humored—impervious, apparently, to the stimuli that drove most people his age, and many older men and women, into frenzies of resentment and anger. Drowning, Manfred seized an uprooted oak—Richard Nixon—in the hope that his weight would cause it to snag on the mud of Jack’s rhetoric and give him a chance to scramble ashore onto the terra firma of Marxist-Leninist principle.
    But Jack was dispassionate, even about Richard Nixon.
    â€œBy any rational standard of judgment,” he said, barely pausing for breath, “Nixon has been a very effective president. An enemy, yes, and a dangerous one. He’ll end the war as soon as he can, on whatever terms he can get.”
    â€œWhat about his constituency, the warmongers?”
    â€œThere are no warmongers,” Jack said. “Just people who want the whole thing to be over. If he gets peace on any terms he’ll be reelected in a landslide.”
    â€œAnd then what?”
    â€œAnd then Armageddon. Nixon will have so much power that his enemies will either have to destroy him or be destroyed by him.”
    â€œWhich will happen?”
    â€œBoth, in the end.”
    Up to then, Greta had shown no sign that she understood a word of the conversation. Suddenly she said, “What a load of shit.”
    Jack said, “Interesting point. Would you like to elaborate?”
    â€œNo.” Greta ground out the stub of her third Gauloise.
    Manfred smiled indulgently, then, as if remembering something, looked at his watch. “Oh dear,” he said, in English. “I’m late. Greta, will you see that Jack finds his way home?”
    She replied in German. “What is he, blind?”
    â€œNo, darling, not blind. Jack is our guest, a stranger in Heidelberg, and he doesn’t know the town yet. And you are his first experience of German womanhood, which is famous for submission and kindness to strangers. So walk him home, please.”
    Greta shrugged. She stood up. “Come, Jack,” she said. “Time for your walk.”
    She spun on her heels and marched toward the exit.
    Manfred said, “Take my advice. Go with her. She’s not so bad when you