Verwandte Artikel zu Little America: A Novel

Little America: A Novel - Hardcover

Bromell, Henry

 
9780375406843: Little America: A Novel
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0375406840 ISBN 13: 9780375406843
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2001

Inhaltsangabe

In a novel about the conflict between private morality and public policy, Mack Hooper sets out to uncover the truth about the past of his father, a Quaker-raised, Yale-educated, former State Department veteran who, in the 1950s, was a CIA station chief assigned to a small Middle Eastern country between Syria and Iraq. 50,000 first printing.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Henry Br0mell won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Award for his first novel, The Slightest Distance. His collection of short stories, I Know Your Heart, Marco Polo, was published by Knopf. Bromell’s stories have appeared in many magazines, among them The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, and have been represented in two O. Henry Award collections. Bromell has written and produced numerous television shows, including Northern Exposure and Chicago Hope. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife and son.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter One

One summer Saturday morning in 1957, almost five months before the events in question, the front door of a modest, two-story stucco house on P Street, in Georgetown, Washington, D.C., opened wide and out I stepped with my mother and my father. I was ten at the time, nursing a pompadour. We had been back from Syria for three years, and in five months we were to be stationed in Kurash, the subject of this story. My father was a spy, or, as he prefers to be remembered, an intelligence officer, with the C.I.A., from 1950 to 1978. He was recruited out of a Wall Street investment firm. He hated Wall Street, but, being a Wasp in good standing, he could only express his hatred indirectly and involuntarily. His neck used to lock in a rigid sideways staring position when riding the commuter train back and forth between Grand Central Station and Hastings- on-Hudson. We lived there—my father, my mother, myself, and a cocker spaniel named Winston—in a rented house on Clinton Street. I wouldn’t say my father, once in the C.I.A., became a happy man; melancholia being, I now realize, endemic, deep in my family’s genes. Rather, I’d say he swapped one kind of anxiety for another. His neck no longer seized on him, yet the acid drip of intelligence-gathering did eventually eat a sizable hole through his stomach and cause him to almost bleed to death.

On that hot summer morning, in 1957, my father and I headed off for Wisconsin Avenue at a leisurely pace. My mother waited for us to turn the corner, then gave chase. Up Wisconsin Avenue I walked. My father disappeared into People’s Drug Store. My mother hesitated, made a decision—she went after my father. A mistake. When she entered the chill relief of People’s air-conditioning and looked around, she couldn’t find him. He had vanished.

We were playing a game.

The game was called Spy.

My father and I were an agent and his control. He had to pass a message to me. My mother was counterintelligence. If she could catch us passing the note, she would win. If she couldn’t, we’d win. We always won. My father always won. Even in the pretend version of his life, he had to win. Looking back, I now see that my mother had to assume on a regular basis the role of a kind of spy’s whipping boy, losing over and over again to my father. But maybe this game, played on weekends since I was seven, helped prepare her for December 1958, when my father flew back to Washington for consultations and left her, to the consternation of all involved, in charge of the Hamra station.

I have several questions regarding what happened, exactly, in that year, 1958, in that place, Kurash.

Kurash was a small country wedged between the eastern border of Jordan, the rump of Syria, and the southwestern corner of Iraq. It no longer exists.

What happened, in history, inexactly, is this: in December of 1958, in Kurash, the young King, only twenty-three at the time, was killed as he stood in the garden behind Hamzah Palace smoking a cigarette. His reign, which lasted a mere five years, ended in the darkness of the garden, his body prone on the gravel, a shadow leaking from him, his own blood or his soul departing his body, shadow of himself, essence of himself, the Fallen King. The blood spread from his wounds, the shadow soon surrounded him, obscured him in the night of December 31, 1958. Three-thirty in the morning. Tuesday. He died instantaneously.

His kingdom collapsed. His branch of the Hashemite family flamed out and burned.

He had no children to suffer exile.

His little country, Kurash, vanished, consumed, like a snack, by Iraq and Syria, in 1965. Our State Department protested, sort of. President Johnson sent the Sixth Fleet to anchor in Beirut Harbor, just to remind people that the United States was still around, that we hadn’t been totally distracted, that Vietnam was not our only concern, which of course it was, and gave the lie to our big gray boats bobbing uselessly in Beirut Harbor, the big gray boats I saw myself from the front lawn of the American Community School, where I was then a high school senior. When I say Kurash vanished, I mean vanished, gone, evaporated. On any map of the Middle East published after 1965, where there had once been a tidy triangle of earth labeled Kurash, there where the borders of Syria, Jordan, and Iraq once had to stop and circumnavigate that brave anachronistic kingdom, they now meet, unimpeded, grossly cheek by jowl.

Gone like a dedicated Politburo leader airbrushed out of a black-and-white photograph of Stalin and his henchmen. Gone like the great tribes of the Sioux and the Shawnee, the peaceful Pocumtucks, the animistic Mohawks.

Eliminated from history.

I know from accounts recently published in the New York Times of secret Congressional hearings in the seventies that a C.I.A. case officer in Hamra, Kurash, in 1958, carried to Hamzah Palace and delivered to the King once a month a briefcase full of cash. In his book Pax Americana, George Seal of the University of Iowa posits that the King was killed by agents of the United States, agents hired and handled by the C.I.A. My father was chief of the C.I.A. station in Hamra at the time of the assassination.

I’m interested in history, which I presently teach (Mod- ern European) at Santa Monica College in Santa Monica, California—Robert Redford’s alma mater. I’m interested in what happens inside history, what history hides, what gets left out and what is forgotten.

I’m fifty years old. My own son, Eli, like me an only child, is now twenty-three and a wizard at special effects in the movies, more specifically, in horror movies. If you’ve seen The Third Spider or Crown of Blood, if you’ve seen the robocyd’s computer head explode in Demon Grin, if you’ve seen the mutation of the caryatids in Time/Slash, then you’ve seen my son’s work. My wife and I live in a two-bedroom bungalow in Ocean Park, about five blocks from the Pacific. I want to state for the record that my wife is terrifically intelligent and looks twenty years younger than her age, frequently causing unemployed young actors to swivel and stare when she sashays by to get her morning latte at Coffee & Bean on Main Street. I wake up eager to bask in her kindness and brilliance; the last thing I see each night before slipping off to the world of dreams is her patient and forgiving smile.

I have before me a fairly comprehensive chronology of events, drawn from witnesses; some participants; memoirs, including Ambassador Tyler Burdick’s Cold War in a Hot Place (Random House, 1961); newspaper reports; files released to me, under the Freedom of Information Act, by a reluctant C.I.A.; and, whenever possible, scholarly works. I say whenever possible because there aren’t many scholarly works dedicated to the question of Kurash in 1958. Very few. In fact, only three: Thomas Polmar’s massive Heartbreak Arabia (Praeger, 1963), the aforementioned Pax Ameri- cana by George Seal (Harcourt, Brace, 1962), and Reluctant Imperialists: CIA and Postwar World Politics by James O. Merrill and Eugene S. Fontana (Simon and Schuster, 1966). I do not, however, know what happened inside history, I do not know if Hamlet killed Polonius, I only know that Polonius died. I lack, so far, to date, regrettably, the evidence of an observer. I have no Mercutio to explain Romeo, I have no Enobarbus to teach me the sad secrets of Anthony, I have no one who has seen too much and can do too little except confess.

Truthfully, I think I’ve always been kind of scared to find out exactly what went on in Kurash in 1958. My father is, after all, my father—secretive, withheld, diffidence personified, but still, my father. I love him deeply, though we...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2001
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0375406840
ISBN 13 
9780375406843
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
395
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780375718915: Little America

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0375718915 ISBN 13:  9780375718915
Verlag: Vintage Books, 2002
Softcover