Spiral

here together?”
    A little discomfort again. ”That is right.”
    ”But they lived in different homes, different parts of the city.”
    ”Very is often at her grandfather’s house.”
    I watched Radescu carefully. ”I also heard that even when she was, Cassandra wouldn’t drive her over here anymore.”
    More discomfort. ”I don’t know about that.”
    ”What happened to drive a wedge between Cassandra and Veronica over coming here to the tennis club?”
    More discomfort still, then a resolution of the rocky features. ”Mr. Cuddy, look around you.”
    ”I already have.”
    ”Again. Please.”
    I took in three-hundred-sixty degrees of tennis club. The buildings and flowers that reminded me of photos from the Mediterranean. The bouncing balls and bounding players, some genuine laughter wafting down from the tiki bar. A smell of the green dust in the air, but also a sense of...
    ”You feel it?” said Radescu.
    I looked at him. ”Feel what?”
    ”The peace, the security, but also the energy here.” He warmed to his subject. ”That is why I live at the tennis club. In Romania when I am young—five, six years of age—there are courts in my city because it is the center of the Communist-bloc oil industry. My friends and I, we make racquets from pieces of wood, and we use the balls that the oil men hit over the fences. When I am older, I am very good tennis player, and when I am older still, in my twenties, I teach tennis, and I dream of coming to America. But the Securitate—you know what this is?”
    ”The secret police?”
    ”That is right exactly. The Romania K.G.B. They keep me under their eyes, because I am making good money, and in foreign currency, which is illegal. Finally, when I am suffocating from the Communism and bureaucracy, I decide to escape.”
    ”Defect?”
    ”Yes, but I am not famous, so I must be careful. I buy on the black market fake passports, and I put what remains of my foreign currency in the handle of a tennis racquet I hollow out. The passports let me go from Romania to Bulgaria, and then to Zagreb in Yugoslavia, but no further. However, a little Jewish man tells me I can cross with all the crowds at Trieste.”
    ”Trieste, Italy?”
    ”Yes. All these Italians go back and forth into Yugoslavia on business each day. I can move in the big crowd with them, and then just run.”
    ”There weren’t any soldiers at the border?”
    A shiver, and I realized why a gate guard might disquiet Radescu.
    He said, ”The Jewish man tells me they will not shoot or release their dogs, because of all the people around me.” Radescu grew quieter. ”But the day I get to the Yugoslav side, there are no big crowds, so I must wait until dark, and then I crawl on my belly through the grass. I crawl like I am swimming on top of the ground, you understand?”
    A frame of me doing that one night outside a base-camp in Vietnam flashed across my mind. ”Yes.”
    ”I crawl and I stop and I listen, and I crawl some more. It is a full moon, but the soldiers are not watching so carefully, and the wind is right, so their dogs do not smell me. After four hours and going across a stream of water, I know I am on the Italian side, and it is the most unbelievable feeling of my life. The meadow where I am is all moonlight, and I feel like I am floating, floating out of my body. I laugh, and I cry, too, but I am free. The big Communist rocks on my shoulders fell off then, even though it takes me six months of detention camps in Italy before I can use my foreign currency to get first to Paris and then to New York. And finally, finally here to the tennis club.”
    Radescu then looked around us as he’d asked me to do. ”That man on Court One, he was the captain of his team at Notre Dame when the Second World War is over, and he can beat most of the club members in their twenties. The Woman I am playing before I talk to you, she is the top-ranked woman over forty-five in New England. And our Don Floyd, he has won two hundred singles tournaments, including the unrestricted championship of Virginia when he is forty himself. A forty-year-old, and he beat all others, regardless of age. This place attracts quality like that, and it is not just the social life and tennis play that keeps the people young. It is that they have something to look forward to in getting older, to be the youngest players in the next competition bracket of age, and reign as champions again.” Radescu picked up his towel and shook it