Free The Name of the World by Denis Johnson

something trivial and muy apropos. For instance, do you have any German? No. Okay then. You’ll be interested to know that in German klatsch means ‘gossip.’ Here is our wonderful hostess; sprechen zie Deutsch ?” he asked as Clara Frenow approached, whisking crumbs from her bosom and getting frosting on her neckline in the process. “At du klatsch we are torn by dogs.”
    “I think you said,” she said, “did you say—?”
    “Yes, in an attempt to be appropriately trivial and at the same time Germanic just somewhat. Clara. My goddess. Are you the originator of the idea that we should occasionally klatsch together?”
    “Uh. Yes,” she said. “Rather I mean—no, Tibby. It’s been atradition since the seventies.” Clara had completed her round of chemotherapy. She didn’t wear a wig, but covered her patchy baldness with an assortment of caps, baseball caps, knit caps, hats of felt, of straw, a sailor’s hat, today a jaunty blue beret that made her look like an English schoolgirl. For a few weeks her battle had shot her full of fire. She’d been running over with new ideas and seemed to be viewing the materials of her life from a mountaintop. The fight had apparently been successful, the cancer was driven back, and now Clara seemed her sad self again.
    And weren’t we all just as sad? These little gatherings where you can smell the sugar, the small cakes. Ours were come-as-you-are, but you couldn’t make these occasions any more bearable by wearing shorts and tennis shoes. Stainless steel urns on brown institutional tables hidden under white paper lace. Professor Frenow in her pitifully jaunty headgear, Tiberius Soames with his fingertips at a floating braille, looking as if the air hurt his skin. He stayed near me but was silent. He smiled a wide terrified distracted smile. I couldn’t tell if he was pained for me or for himself.
    The History Department was thriving, thanks entirely to Soames. As a young diplomat in the Haitian government, I believe an assistant to the President’s Chargé d’Affaires, he’d been implicated in a coup conspiracy, quite accurately, he said, and I didn’t doubt him. He escaped to France and received political refugee status, which protected him from extradition. He claimed to have been spirited to Paris by the British MI-6. When he talked of his past he had a habit of stating somewhere invariably in the tale, “All the boys in MI-6 went to the same school and shared a horrible adolescence.” This information meant something to him. He was always turning it over in his mind, apparently, but as far as I know he never got its significance across to any of the rest of us. The kids adored his personal reminiscences, stories that sometimes hijacked whole lecture periods but which he tied to the study of history in a way that illuminated it as the very medium of our lives. Here, after all, stood a man who lived under sentence of death in the land of his fathers. History had done that. He would never return. He’d written half a dozen books, contributed frequently to Foreign Affairs, and had a good exile. Still, it was exile.
    Clara rang her spoon against her cup and delivered a toast. A toast to me. The purpose of today’s gathering was to celebrate me. Because I was leaving. Everyone applauded politely.
    Apparently they weren’t going to renew my contract. This was news. I’d expected one more appointment, and then the gate. Clara and I had chatted at the end of the previous year and left the subject open; somehow it had closed all by itself. Here I’d been wondering what would happen to me year after next, and it was happening now.
    I wondered if, in the shuffle of medicines and sorrows through her recent life, Clara had simply forgotten to discuss this with me. As I tumbled it all over in my mind, smiling and faking my thanks, bitter and relieved, I considered she’d probably at first simply hoped, and finally just presumed, that no discussion was necessary. Out of