American Romantic by Ward Just

Author:Ward Just
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Joseph’s tent was identical to the other tents, twenty feet long by twelve wide, the canvas of a color similar to the hardpan underfoot. Mosquito netting covered the tent flap. He pushed both aside and preceded her into the tent, where he lit a kerosene lamp. The wick flickered and then caught, casting a yellow light into the interior, hard dark shadows. Sieglinde paused inside the tent flap, startled by what she saw. A figured carpet covered the hardpan. A canvas chair and a table piled high with books were next to the lamp. Two steamer trunks sat opposite, more books atop the trunks. The books gave the room an academic air, as if there were a classroom nearby and students. Hooks in the canvas held sketches, evidently Joseph’s. They were drawings of the terrain, various aspects of it, though the line of sight was monotonous. Sieglinde could not see how he found variety. On the hook over the steamer trunk was a print of Caspar David Friedrich’s lonely traveler atop a German mountain looking west into the dying sun, smaller mountains in fog between the traveler and the sun. Friedrich called the piece Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog. He painted the traveler from the rear so that his face could not be seen, only a slender figure in a black cloth coat and black gaiters, one hand holding a walking stick, no hat. He stood in the submissive posture of the aesthete. Joseph’s sketches seemed to take their inspiration from Friedrich, yet there was something subtracted. Sieglinde could not define what, unless it was the absence of human forms, leaving only the bleak landscape of eastern Tunisia. The sketches and Joseph’s books suggested a life apart from the ardor of the archaeological dig. Men needed a distraction from their workaday lives. Thinking of that, she thought also of Harry Sanders’s piano, so badly out of tune in the tropical heat.

Joseph’s tent had a nest-like quality and was spotless and orderly in the way a bachelor’s life was said to be orderly, spoiled only slightly by the industrial odor of kerosene. His clothes hung on wire hangers from a hat rack. The ashtrays were clean. On the table beside the books was a carafe of water and one cup. When she looked up, Sieglinde noticed a mobile suspended from the ceiling, turning slowly as she imagined the earth turning. There was no breeze inside the tent, and then she saw above the table a little grilled window fitted with mosquito netting. She had not seen a mosquito since arriving the week before, so that could be bachelor’s caution. Joseph sat on the bed, a double cot with a blue duvet and two pillows with white linen covers. He motioned for Sieglinde to take the chair.

Heimat, he said, and she laughed, unaccountably at ease in Joseph’s tent. Her own tent was without ornament of any kind, unless you counted a wind-up clock and a bottle of eau de cologne as ornaments.

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