Seven Lies Read Online Free PDF

ire. On the diplomatic stage at that particular moment in history, when the two sides of the globe had worked themselves into an inflammable sweat of paranoid terror about each other’s intentions, the smallest things were charged with an exaggerated significance. There was the well-known incident of the Soviet official who forgot to remove his hat when he greeted President Nixon in Moscow for the signing of the SALT I treaty. The negligence was interpreted by the Americans as a deliberate affront, and the newspapers spent many days speculating on what precise grievance was being symbolically expressed. Given that this year, the year of my father’s blunder, happened to be the very year in which our state was prevailed upon to change its constitution, and proclaim itself ‘for ever and irrevocably allied’ with the Soviet Union, my father had good reason to be worried. History doesn’t relate what happened to the official who forgot to take off his hat, but there is little reason to believe that he was forgiven for his error.
    At any rate, my father wasn’t. A few days after his return he was told that he had been removed from the UN team.
    My father must have guessed that that was to be his last trip; in addition to the usual case of miniatures for bribing Herr Brandt, he had brought with him presents of an especially poignant ‘Americanness’: a raccoon-skin hat for my mother, a New Mexican turquoise pin for Kitty, a calculator for Otto, and for me a set of metal ballpoint pens, each in the shape of a famous American skyscraper. These joined the other knick-knacks and gadgets he had brought home on earlier trips, and because they were now part of a finite series, never to be further augmented, they acquired a hallowed quality in our household. They were the sacred relics of a brief, visionary connection with a reality larger than our own; one that had tragically eluded our grasp.

CHAPTER 2
    So much for my family’s glorious ascent into the international political elite of New York.
    To my mother’s credit, she never directly reproached my father, but the tragic aura she assumed from then on must have been a living reproach to him, and even if it wasn’t, he certainly subjected himself to enough reproach of his own. Quite a rapid change came over him: he continued to work hard (he was sent back to the Friendship Treaties, and the subsequent agreements on technology-sharing with other Warsaw Pact countries), but under what seemed a steadily thickening glaze of failure. He wasn’t the type to respond to criticism from his superiors with defiance or countercriticism. What he seemed to want were opportunities to show his loyalty and diligence, if not in order to be reinstated, then at least to be acknowledged as a faithful servant. At the same time, though, he had obviously lost his self-confidence, and with it the air of quiet capability that had once impressed people, so that even if his blunder had been forgiven, he was clearly no longer suitable for a high-level career in the diplomatic service. His appearance grew shabbier. He aged. There was something distracted and disconcertingly meek in the way he smiled.
    As for my mother’s ‘tragic aura’, it was a complex thing; ahybrid, I believe, of real disappointment, and a kind of tactical reorganisation of her forces. There was humility in it – just enough to deflect the Schadenfreude or downright vengeful delight of her acquaintances, and to convert what had formerly been a rather too flagrant haughtiness into something more subtle and sombre and dignified. If she could no longer intimidate people by the suggestion of hidden powers in her possession, she could make them respect her out of consideration for the magnitude of our loss. She made a point of telling our friends and neighbours what had happened, always in a tone of sad but unselfpitying acceptance of our misfortune, thereby establishing the event in