Джонатан Франзен – The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History (страница 4)

Because there were so few things in the apartment, it didn’t take me long to figure out that one of them—the pair of scissors from the sheath—had disappeared while I was in California. My reaction was like that of the dragon Smaug in The Hobbit, when Smaug realizes that a gold cup is missing from his mountain of precious objects. I flew around and around the apartment, smoke spewing from my nostrils. When I interrogated the housesitter, who said she hadn’t seen the scissors, I had to struggle not to bite her head off. I ransacked the place, went through every drawer and cabinet twice. It enraged me that, of all the things that could have disappeared, what I’d lost had been something of my mother’s.

I was enraged about the aftermath of Katrina, too. For a while, that September, I couldn’t go online, open a newspaper, or even take cash from an ATM without encountering entreaties to aid the hurricane’s homeless victims. The fund-raising apparatus was so far-reaching and well orchestrated it seemed quasi-official, like the “Support Our Troops” ribbons that had shown up on half the country’s cars overnight. But it seemed to me that helping Katrina’s homeless victims ought to be the government’s job, not mine. I’d always voted for candidates who wanted to raise my taxes, because I thought paying taxes was patriotic and because my idea of how to be left alone—my libertarian ideal!—was a well-funded, well-managed central government that spared me from having to make a hundred different spending decisions every week. Like, was Katrina as bad as the Pakistan earthquake? As bad as breast cancer? As bad as AIDS in Africa? Not as bad? How much less bad? I wanted my government to figure these things out.

It was true that the Bush tax cuts had put some extra money in my pocket, and that even those of us who hadn’t voted for a privatized America were still obliged to be good citizens. But with government abandoning so many of its former responsibilities, there were now hundreds of new causes to contribute to. Bush hadn’t just neglected emergency management and flood control; aside from Iraq, there wasn’t much he hadn’t neglected. Why should I pony up for this particular disaster? And why give political succor to people I believed were ruining the country? If the Republicans were so opposed to big government, let them ask their own donors to pony up! It was possible, moreover, that the antitax billionaires and antitax small-business owners who got antitax representatives elected to Congress were all giving generously to the relief effort, but it seemed equally likely that these people whose idea of injustice was getting to keep only $2 million of their $2.8 million annual income, rather than all of it, were secretly counting on the decency of ordinary Americans to help with Katrina: were playing us for suckers. When private donations replaced federal spending, you had no idea who was freeloading and who was pulling twice their weight.

All of which was to say: my impulse toward charity was now fully subordinate to my political rage. And it wasn’t as if I was happy to feel so polarized. I wanted to be able to write a check, because I wanted to put Katrina’s victims out of my mind and get back to enjoying my life, because, as a New Yorker, I felt I had a right to enjoy my life, because I was living in the number-one terrorist target in the Western Hemisphere, the preferred destination of every future lunatic with a portable nuclear device or smallpox dispenser, and because life in New York was liable to go from great to ghastly even faster than it had in New Orleans. I was arguably already pulling my weight as a citizen simply by living with the many new bull’s-eyes that George Bush had painted on my back—and on the back of every other New Yorker—by starting his unwinnable war in Iraq, wasting hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spent fighting real terrorists, galvanizing a new generation of America-hating jihadists, and deepening our dependence on foreign oil. The shame and the danger of being a citizen of a country that the rest of the world identified with Bush: wasn’t this enough of a burden?

I’d been back in the city for two weeks, thinking thoughts like these, when I got a mass e-mailing from a Protestant minister named Chip Jahn. I’d known Jahn and his wife in the 1970s, and more recently I’d gone to visit them at their parsonage in rural southern Indiana, where he’d shown me his two churches and his wife had let me ride her horse. The subject header of his e-mail was “Louisiana Mission,” which led me to fear another plea for donations. But Jahn was simply reporting on the tractor-trailers that members of his churches had filled with supplies and driven down to Louisiana:

A couple of women in the congregation said we ought to send a truck south to help with hurricane relief. The Foertschs were willing to donate a truck and Lynn Winkler and Winkler Foods were willing to help get food and water …

Our plans grew as pledges came in. (Just over $35,000 in gifts and pledges. Over $12,000 was from St. Peter and Trinity.) We quickly began looking for another truck and drivers. It turned out to be no more difficult to find these than it was to raise the money. Larry and Mary Ann Wetzel were ready with their truck. Phil Liebering would be their second driver …

Foertsch’s truck had the heavier but shorter trailer, which was loaded with water. Larry’s truck had the pallets of food and baby supplies. We bought $500 worth of towels and washcloths and 100 foam sleeping pads at the last minute, because of the great response of pledges. Both were on Thibodaux’s wish list. They were happy to see us. The unloading went quickly and they asked if they could use Wetzel’s semitrailer to move the clothes to another warehouse, which meant they could move it with a forklift instead of by hand …

Reading Jahn’s e-mail, I wished, as I would ordinarily never wish, that I belonged to a church in southern Indiana, so that I could have ridden in one of those trucks. It would have been awkward, of course, to sit in a church every Sunday and sing hymns to a God I didn’t believe in. And yet: wasn’t this exactly what my parents had done on every Sunday of their adult lives? I wondered how I’d got from their world into the apartment of a person I didn’t even recognize as myself. Throughout the autumn, whenever my eyes fell on the half-empty leather sheath, the absence of the scissors stabbed me afresh. I simply couldn’t believe they’d disappeared. Months after my return, I was still reransacking drawers and closet shelves I’d searched three times already.

The other house of my childhood was a sprawling, glass-fronted, six-bedroom rich person’s retreat on a vast white-sand beach in the Florida Panhandle. In addition to its private Gulf frontage, the house came with free local golf and deep-sea fishing privileges and a refrigerated beer keg that guests were encouraged to make unlimited use of; there was a phone number to call if the keg ever ran dry. We were able to vacation in this house, living like rich people, for six consecutive Augusts, because the railroad my father worked for sometimes bought rail-maintenance equipment from the house’s owner. Without informing the owner, my parents also took the liberty of asking along our good friends Kirby and Ellie, their son David, and, one year, their nephew Paul. That there was something not quite right about these arrangements was evident in my parents’ annual reminders to Kirby and Ellie that it was extremely important that they not arrive at the house early, lest they run into the owner or the owner’s agent.

In 1974, after we’d vacationed in the house for five straight years, my father decided that we had to stop accepting the owner’s hospitality. He was giving more and more of his business to one of the owner’s competitors, an Austrian manufacturer whose equipment my father considered superior to anything being made in the United States. In the late sixties, he’d helped the Austrians break into the American market, and their gratitude to him had been immediate and total. In the fall of 1970, at the company’s invitation, he and my mother had taken their first-ever trip to Europe, visiting Austria and the Alps for a week and Sweden and England for another week. I never found out whether the company paid for absolutely everything, including airfare, or whether it paid only for their meals and their nights in top-drawer hotels like the Imperial in Vienna and the Ritz in Paris, and for the Lincoln Continental and its driver, Johann, who chauffeured my parents around three countries and helped them with their shopping, none of which they could have afforded on their own. Their companions for the trip were the company’s head of American operations and his wife, Use, who, beginning every day at noon, taught them how to eat and drink like Europeans. My mother was in heaven. She kept a diary of restaurants and hotels and scenic attractions—