第4章 Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning

K. at His Desk He is neither abrupt with nor excessively kind to associates. Or he is both abrupt and kind. The telephone is, for him, a whip, a lash, but also a conduit for soothing words, a sink into which he can hurl gallons of syrup if it comes to that. He reads quickly, scratching brief comments ("Yes," "No") in corners of the paper. He slouches in the leather chair, looking about him with a slightly irritated air for new visitors, new difficul?ties. He spends his time sending and receiving messengers.

"I spend my time sending and receiving messen?gers," he says. "Some of these messages are im?portant. Others are not." Described by Secretaries A: "Quite frankly I think he forgets a lot of things. But the things he forgets are those which are inessential. I even think he might forget delib?erately, to leave his mind free. He has the ability to get rid of unimportant details. And he does."

B: "Once when I was sick, I hadnt heard from him, and I thought he had forgotten me. You know usually your boss will send flowers or something like that. I was in the hospital, and I was mighty blue. I was in a room with another girl, and her boss hadnt sent her anything either. Then sud?denly the door opened and there he was with the biggest bunch of yellow tulips Id ever seen in my life. And the other girls boss was with him, and he had tulips too. They were standing there with all those tulips, smiling."

Behind the Bar At a crowded party, he wanders behind the bar to make himself a Scotch and water. His hand is on the bottle of Scotch, his glass is waiting. The bar?tender, a small man in a beige uniform with gilt buttons, politely asks K. to return to the other side, the guests side, of the bar. "You let one be?hind here, they all be behind here," the bartender says.

K. Reading the Newspaper His reactions are impossible to catalogue. Often he will find a note that amuses him endlessly, some anecdote involving, say, a fireman who has pro?pelled his apparatus at record-breaking speed to the wrong address. These small stories are clipped, carried about in a pocket, to be produced at appropriate moments for the pleasure of friends. Other manifestations please him less. An account of an earthquake in Chile, with its thousands of dead and homeless, may depress him for weeks. He memorizes the terrible statistics, quoting them everywhere and saying, with a grave look: "We must do something." Important actions often fol?low, sometimes within a matter of hours. (On the other hand, these two kinds of responses may be, on a given day, inexplicably reversed.)

The more trivial aspects of the daily itemization are skipped. While reading, he maintains a rapid drumming of his fingertips on the desktop. He re?ceives twelve newspapers, but of these, only four are regarded as serious. Attitude Toward His Work "Sometimes I cant seem to do anything. The work is there, piled up, it seems to me an insur?mountable obstacle, really out of reach. I sit and look at it, wondering where to begin, how to take hold of it. Perhaps I pick up a piece of paper, try to read it but my mind is elsewhere, I am thinking of something else, I cant seem to get the gist of it, it seems meaningless, devoid of interest, not having to do with human affairs, drained of life. Then, in an hour, or even a moment, everything changes suddenly: I realize I only have to do it, hurl myself into the midst of it, proceed mechanically, the first thing and then the second thing, that it is simply a matter of moving from one step to the next, plow?ing through it. I become interested, I become ex?cited, I work very fast, things fall into place, I am exhilarated, amazed that these things could ever have seemed dead to me."

Sleeping on the Stones of Unknown Towns (Rim?baud) K. is walking, with that familiar slight dip of the shoulders, through the streets of a small city in France or Germany. The shop signs are in a lan?guage which alters when inspected closely, MoBEL becoming MEUBLES for example, and the citizens mutter to themselves with dark virtuosity a mixture of languages. K. is very interested, looks closely at everything, at the shops, the goods displayed, the clothing of the people, the tempo of street life, the citizens themselves, wondering about them. What are their water needs?

"In the West, wisdom is mostly gained at lunch. At lunch, people tell you things." The nervous eyes of the waiters. The tall bald cook, white apron, white T-shirt, grinning through an opening in the wall. "Why is that cook looking at me?" Urban Transportation "The transportation problems of our cities and their rapidly expanding suburbs are the most ur?gent and neglected transportation problems con?fronting the country. In these heavily populated and industrialized areas, people are dependent on a system of transportation that is at once complex and inadequate. Obsolete facilities and growing demands have created seemingly insoluble difficul?ties and present methods of dealing with these difficulties offer little prospect of relief."

K. Penetrated with Sadness He hears something playing on someone elses radio, in another part of the building. The music is wretchedly sad; now he can (barely) hear it, now it fades into the wall. He turns on his own radio. There it is, on his own radio, the same music. The sound fills the room.

Karsh of Ottawa "We sent a man to Karsh of Ottawa and told him that we admired his work very much. Especially, I dont know, the Churchill thing and, you know, the Hemingway thing, and all that. And we told him we wanted to set up a sitting for K. sometime in June, if that would be convenient for him, and he said yes, that was okay, June was okay, and where did we want to have it shot, there or in New York or where. Well, that was a problem because we didnt know exactly what Ks schedule would be for June, it was up in the air, so we tentatively said New York around the fifteenth. And he said, that was okay, he could do that. And he wanted to know how much time he could have, and we said, well, how much time do you need? And he said he didnt know, it varied from sitter to sitter. He said some people were very restless and that made it difficult to get just the right shot. He said there was one shot in each sitting that was, you know, the key shot, the right one. He said hed have to see, when the time ca me."

Dress He is neatly dressed in a manner that does not call attention to itself. The suits are soberly cut and in dark colors. He must at all times present an aspect of freshness difficult to sustain because of frequent movements from place to place under con?ditions which are not always the most favorable. Thus he changes clothes frequently, especially shirts. In the course of a day he changes his shirt many times. There are always extra shirts about, in boxes. "Which of you has the shirts?" A Friend Comments: Ks Aloneness "The thing you have to realize about K. is that essentially hes absolutely alone in the world. Theres this terrible loneliness which prevents peo?ple from getting too close to him. Maybe it comes from something in his childhood, I dont know. But hes very hard to get to know, and a lot of people who think they know him rather well dont really know him at all. He says something or does some?thing that surprises you, and you realize that all along you really didnt know him at all. "He has surprising facets. I remember once we were out in a small boat. K. of course was the cap?tain. Some rough weather came up and we began to head back in. I began worrying about picking up a landing and I said to him that I didnt think the anchor would hold, with the wind and all. He just looked at me. Then he said: Of course it will hold. Thats what its for. " K. on Crowds "There are exhausted crowds and vivacious crowds. "Sometimes, standing there, I can sense whether a particular crowd is one thing or the other. Some?times the mood of the crowd is disguised, some?times you only find out after a quarter of an hour what sort of crowd a particular crowd is. "And you cant speak to them in the same way. The variations have to be taken into account. You have to say something to them that is meaningful to them in that mood." Gallery-going K. enters a large gallery on Fifty-seventh Street, in the Fuller Building. His entourage includes sev?eral ladies and gentlemen. Works by a geometricist are on show. K. looks at the immense, rather theo?retical paintings. "Well, at least we know he has a ruler." The group dissolves in laughter. People repeat the remark to one another, laughing. The artist, who has been standing behind a dealer, regards K. with hatred. K. Puzzled by His Children The children are crying. There are several chil?dren, one about four, a boy, then another boy, slightly older, and a little girl, very beautiful, wear?ing blue jeans, crying. There are various objects on the grass, an electric train, a picture book, a red ball, a plastic bucket, a plastic shovel. K. frowns at the children whose distress issues from no source immediately available to the eye, which seems indeed uncaused, vacant, a general anguish. K. turns to the mother of these children who is standing nearby wearing hip-huggers which appear to be made of linked marshmallows studded with diamonds but then I am a notoriously poor observer. "Play with them," he says. This mother of ten quietly suggests that K. him?self "play with them." K. picks up the picture book and begins to read to the children. But the book has a German text. It has been left behind, perhaps, by some foreign visitor. Nevertheless K. perseveres. "A ist der Affe, er isst mit der Pfote." ("A is the Ape, he eats with his Paw.") The crying of the children continues. A Dream Orange trees. Overhead, a steady stream of strange aircraft which resemble kitchen implements, bread boards, cookie sheets, colanders. The shiny aluminum instruments are on their way to complete the bombing of Sidi-Madani. A farm in the hills. Matters (from an Administrative Assistant) "A lot of matters that had been pending came to a head right about that time, moved to the front burner, things we absolutely had to take care of. And we couldnt find K. Nobody knew where he was. We had looked everywhere. He had just with?drawn, made himself unavailable. There was this one matter that was probably more pressing than all the rest put together. Really crucial. We were all standing around wondering what to do. We were getting pretty nervous because this thing was really. . . Then K. walked in and disposed of it with a quick phone call. A quick phone call!" Childhood of K. as Recalled by a Former Teacher "He was a very alert boy, very bright, good at his studies, very thorough, very conscientious. But thats not unusual; that describes a good number of the boys who pass through here. Its not unusual, that is, to find these qualities which are after all the qualities that we look for and encourage in them. What was unusual about K. was his compassion, something very rare for a boy of that age -- even if they have it, theyre usually very careful not to display it for fear of seeming soft, girlish. I remem?ber, though, that in K. this particular attribute was very marked. I would almost say that it was his strongest characteristic." Speaking to No One but Waiters, He -- "The dandelion salad with bacon, I think." "The rysstafel." "The poached duck." "The black bean puree." "The cod fritters." K. Explains a Technique "Its an expedient in terms of how not to destroy a situation which has been a long time gestating, or, again, how to break it up if it appears that the situation has changed, during the gestation period, into one whose implications are not quite what they were at the beginning. What I mean is that in this business things are constantly altering (usually for worse) and usually you want to give the im?pression that youre not watching this particular situation particularly closely, that youre paying no special attention to it, until youre ready to make your move. That is, its best to be sudden, if you can manage it. Of course you cant do that all the time. Sometimes youre just completely wiped out, cleaned out, totaled, and then the only thing to do is shrug and forget about it." K. on His Own Role "Sometimes it seems to me that it doesnt matter what I do, that it is enough to exist, to sit some?where, in a garden for example, watching whatever is to be seen there, the small events. At other times, Im aware that other people, possibly a great num?ber of other people, could be affected by what I do or fail to do, that I have a responsibility, as we all have, to make the best possible use of whatever talents Ive been given, for the common good. It is not enough to sit in that garden, however restful or pleasurable it might be. The world is full of un?solved problems, situations that demand careful, reasoned and intelligent action. In Latin America, for example." As Entrepreneur The original cost estimates for burying the North Sea pipeline have been exceeded by a considerable margin. Everyone wonders what he will say about this contretemps which does not fail to have its dangers for those responsible for the costly miscal?culations, which are viewed in many minds as in?excusable. He says only: "Exceptionally difficult rock con?ditions." With Young People K., walking the streets of unknown towns, finds himself among young people. Young people line these streets, narrow and curving, which are theirs, dedicated to them. They are everywhere, resting on the embankments, their guitars, small radios, long hair. They sit on the sidewalks, back to back, heads turned to stare. They stand implacably on street corners, in doorways, or lean on their elbows in windows, or squat in small groups at that place where the sidewalk meets the walls of buildings. The streets are filled with these young people who say nothing, reveal only a limited interest, refuse to declare themselves. Street after street contains them, a great number, more displayed as one turns a corner, rank upon rank stretching into the dis?tance, drawn from the arcades, the plazas, staring. He Discusses the French Writer, Poulet "For Poulet, it is not enough to speak of seizing the moment. It is rather a question of, and I quote, recognizing in the instant which lives and dies, which surges out of nothingness and which ends in dream, an intensity and depth of significance which ordinarily attaches only to the whole of existence. "What Poulet is describing is neither an ethic nor a prescription but rather what he has discovered in the work of Marivaux. Poulet has taken up the Marivaudian canon and squeezed it with both hands to discover the essence of what may be called the Marivaudian being, what Poulet in fact calls the Marivaudian being. "The Marivaudian being is, according to Poulet, a pastless futureless man, born anew at every in?stant. The instants are points which organize them?selves into a line, but what is important is the instant, not the line. The Marivaudian being has in a sense no history. Nothing follows from what has gone before. He is constantly surprised. He cannot predict his own reaction to events. He is constantly being overtaken by events. A condition of breathlessness and dazzlement surrounds him. In conse?quence he exists in a certain freshness which seems, if I may say so, very desirable. This freshness Poulet, quoting Marivaux, describes very well." K. Saved from Drowning K. in the water. His flat black hat, his black cape, his sword are on the shore. He retains his mask. His hands beat the surface of the water which tears and rips about him. The white foam, the green depths. I throw a line, the coils leaping out over the surface of the water. He has missed it. No, it ap?pears that he has it. His right hand (sword arm) grasps the line that I have thrown him. I am on the bank, the rope wound round my waist, braced against a rock. K. now has both hands on the line. I pull him out of the water. He stands now on the bank, gasping. "Thank you."