Traveling Short Distances

By Leon Hampton

A chiaroscuro of the human homing instinct, often insistent, seldom placated.

The story takes us to the mid nineteen-eighties, before the advent of cell phones. Here even the telephone plays a supporting role, the instrument of friendship, revelation, and deceit. Europe's cities and their seasons set the backdrop for a tale of longing, doubt, and quests in midstream.

"No one pities diplomats," says Ian Howlett, caught in a career many might envy.

And yet.

No one knew it at the time, but bloodless Cold War conflict would soon take new forms altogether.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Apr 14, 2022
• ISBN: 9781669820734

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Copyright © 2022 by Leon Hampton.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Cover Image:

Vilhelm Hammershøi

Sunbeams or Sunlight, (1900)

Oil on canvas, 70 x 59

Ordrupgaard, Copenhagen

Photo: Anders Sune Berg

Rev. date: 07/06/2022

Xlibris

844-714-8691

www.Xlibris.com

837112

Contents

I: Howlett

1985: The Receptions

II: Jelena

1965: The Lights

1971: The West

1986: One Short Year with Jelena Wolff

1987: Traveling Short Distances

Winter Confidences

III: Inge

1989: Paris and Beyond

Madame Bovary of The Dinner Table

Lies in a Dark Room

IV: Visits

Five Evenings with Warren

Warren Meets Inge

Howlett Pauses

Howlett in Warsaw

V: Messages

To Each Life, Only One Passion

Again to The Cliffs

VI: Rocks in The Water

Dropped

Other Forms of Rescue

Martin Advises; Inge Raves

No Mere Meeting

Weather’s Stirrings, Weeks’ Passing

Field Engagement

VII: The Phone

...Which Did not Mean There Was Not a Life to be Lived

Howlett Goes Home

City’s Quiet

Østerbro Revisited

The Phone Again

Then Karin

Howlett The Fatalist

VIII: And Finally

Finding Signs

Howlett Concludes

I

Howlett

1985: The Receptions

Guests moved like colonies of protozoa from hallway to waiting room, dining area to salon. The invited fed as if on themselves collectively, inspected clothes and the facial lines of others, ate, drank. Ministry officials, museum curators, editors, and the known wealthy tossed greetings around, drifting in packs through the smokey hallways of the ambassador’s residence in Wellington.

The invited, thought Ian Howlett to himself. Rhymes with benighted.

They called him Howlett. It was a poke at diplomats in a bureaucracy at times trying to sound like the military. Last names didn’t stick with all of them but did with Ian as of his first posting.

He took a crab hors d’oeuvre before it could slip away on the caterer’s platter. Junior officer half groomed for the economic section of the U.S. Embassy in New Zealand, he stroked the desert-colored beard on his jaw like a reliquary from his academic days. At thirty-eight he welcomed the thought of taking the scissors to it one day soon, shedding it and getting on with something new. For the moment, though, he hung onto it as a mark of vanishing liberty, while embedding himself into the dip corps. A part of him still clung to dashed aspirations of the academy and its relative innocence.

Once he’d shaved within a few weeks, he would throw himself into the new, and pivot to the diplomatic career track with more conviction. This would mean hardening himself to skepticism from friends back home. On the one hand his former university colleagues saw him as the opportunist and sell-out. On the other, diplomats saw him as the academic has-been from the entering class of econ officers three years before.

He knew his job at the reception was to work the crowd and serve as social lubricant with contacts from the Ministry of Finance, also the economic writers from the Kiwi newspapers. He felt he’d done his share of this for a little over an hour of the evening; now he needed a break. He sidled over to an eddy of colleagues from the Embassy — Tim Callahan, political counselor; Dave Jenkins, general services officer; Rosemary Beale, junior consular officer.

Wellington was no visa mill; there were times when Rosemary saw it as an extravagance even to have a visa section in New Zealand. We crank ’m out not so much for Kiwis as for the occasional, diverted Filipino applying from out of country, she’d written months before in a letter for her boyfriend back home in Oregon. She’d shown the letter to Howlett before sending it on. But she hadn’t shown him the last page, advising the hopeful beau to hope no longer, now that geography had gotten the better of them as their paths diverged.

Lordy, just keep me away from those places where you have to take those nasty little green pills, Callahan was saying of past and future postings. His tongue worked the inside of his weathered face, darting around a sliver of salmon on paper-thin, hard rye bread. His asymmetrical eyes wandered as did his tongue, giving him the aspect of the martyr.

What’s the difference? Jenkins queried. Near the Equator: malaria suppressant. To the two extremities: valium. One way or the other there’ll always be green pills.

Rosemary Beale cast a look of recognition to Howlett, her fellow junior officer. He studied her look but then gave in to a greater hilarity: he’d found Jenkins’s comment on the mark, and Howlett laughed. A minute later he thought, Is it the job that makes the attitude? Or the type of person the job draws in? Even asking these questions showed the limits of his involvement from the sidelines of the foreign service, waiting it out in the dugout before he’d get the nod, and then, fully formed, onto the field.

All four glanced to the other end of the room, where a freelance American photographer had the deputy chief of mission cornered like prey. They knew the photographer as the freeloader who worked his way into every reception in order to broaden the contacts that might rescue his failing career.

Catch DCM Murray, Jenkins said in a stage whisper, noting Murray’s plight. Got a barnacle on him. Hee hee. Under Jenkins’ eyes were creases of oversleep and indulgence, making him seem like a bully on a playground. Which in fact he wasn’t.

I can’t remember from Boy Scouts, Callahan said. How was it, again, that you get a barnacle off? I used to know: was it salt? Flame? Vinegar?

Blow torch in this case... Jenkins countered, as the invited guests moved, again by unknown impetus, toward the dining area near the Ambassador’s back porch. Hee hee.

Howlett had landed in the Foreign Service by accident, as he had done most things. Taking the exam one year on a whim, as if buying a lottery ticket, he’d lacked the moral fiber later to withdraw his application once he’d faced the dread of being yanked out of semi-comfort. An itinerant life didn’t really seem to fit, at least not at the beginning. If ever he had a mold to suit him, it was more that of the scholar anchored by permanence and the vertical root structure he’d once thrived by — if only he could have landed a tenured appointment.

That was the road not taken.

Economics he’d come to obliquely from his masters in history at Knowlton College, with diversions along an ancient Greek vocabulary he’d never fully mastered. A year with comp lit had left him with a single arching image from Flaubert, wedded to a betrayed longing of his own: in one of the nineteenth-century man’s letters to Turgenev, the French novelist had spoken of milk jugs with curds and whey, left to stand alone and form valuable creams and milks and butters — nourishment out of the stillness.

Howlett’s obscured Slavic ancestry found wonder but no familiarity with French precision. He hadn’t taken or usurped his Anglo name. Rather, it had been bestowed randomly to an ancestor he knew nothing of, from Europe’s bloodlands to the east, with any immigration cop’s best intention when assimilation was the goal of newcomers. He wasn’t emotionally dumb; he knew the name Howlett had brought an easier life for some great grandparent. Also, though, it ripped from the genealogy a Slavic empathy and anguish, checked for safekeeping at Ellis Island but never removed. The blood or DNA or whatever transmits these things lay like a negative image on a faded emulsion.

He thought again of the beard, knew he’d get rid of it for simplicity’s sake. At these times his angular chin and greenish/greyish eyes would reveal his scruffiness from behind the camouflage of his jacket and conventional tie. Like putting a gussied-up savage in a parlor. He knew that by habit only, his shoulders and chin would thrust hopefully (not confidently) forward.

Howlett was no sentimentalist; he knew that disloyalties to his lost ideals would be harmless, pointless in the end. In fact, the drift toward the scattered existence of Foreign Service did him a favor by pulling him from the stasis of his Middle American upbringing.

Raised in the snowbelt suburb of Wauwatosa outside of Milwaukee, he’d knocked around in his parents’ ersatz Scottish castle during his school years. The house had been built in the hopeful years of the late 1950’s, an architect’s free association on the theme of the rugged manor by the loch, solid with stones meant to suggest the grime of centuries. Even after twenty-five years, however, not much grime had settled to draw the house from the surfacy cheer of its suburban community. Gloom was a good designer’s inspiration, but in an alien soil where it never took root.

Hard to heat in winter, the house was far enough from the city and its noise and commotion, but too far from the bus lines to offer the young Ian any easy escape from its isolation.

His round-faced father had managed, but did not own, a small furniture store chain in Wauwatosa. As a youth out of college in the 1940’s, Abe Howlett had allowed himself two years of aspiration to a stage career, trying his luck in New York while waiting tables. Later he’d made his accommodation with an American’s need to live in a multi-level house, and somehow to leave behind a carcass of unfulfilled hopes.

Ian’s mother Eva, petite and well pulled together, was once and always attractive. With her husband, she fit into the tableaux vivants of New Yorker cartoons of the time, showing commonplace couples as knight and lady at the breakfast table, nailed them to earth behind a vocabulary of derring-do. Eva had the suburbanite’s respect, even affection, for those who reached more recklessly for spiritual content. She read the poets who ripped bare America’s hardscrabble emphasis on commercial and material progress. She got it. Yet she opted with Abe for the here and now of doing whatever it took to get beyond penury. Ardor was no virtue, compromise no sin. The safe platform strengthened Ian the child, but later he despised it as he came to crave a wider world.

For Ian the son, spontaneity and strivings lay beneath, embedded in previous centuries. The attainable, the familiar, was of Midwestern grey skies and winter gloom, and