Appassionata by Eva Hoffman

don’t, the Germans will veto my promotion.” He raises his eyebrows in a kind of sardonic QED. “I don’t know which is worse.”
    “Shouldn’t you think about what’s best objectively?” Isabel asks, feeling sanctimonious even as she poses the question.
    “Objectively best for whom?” he retorts sharply. “It’s not so simple anymore. If it ever was. Somebody always loses, no matter what. Though they don’t lose very much, that’s how things are different now. We’re good at lowering the stakes, it’s our specialty. Of course, nobody ever seems to win,” he continues, gaining steam on the momentum of his own logic. “But that’s all right. At least nobody goes to war over it. Nobody gets killed. Not over interest rates. Not in Europe. That’s our great improvement.” He looks at her directly. “But in the meantime,”he says, “I would like to get my promotion. Soon.”
    “Aren’t you making yourself out to be even more of a cad than you really are?” she says, half jokingly. She thinks, everyone wants power after all. There must have been fierce tension in that room, had she only known how to read it.
    “Ah, no, that’s exactly how much of a cad I am,” he replies, idly. His eyes, looking at her over his brandy, are acute and cool. She knows he’s basically uninsultable; that was part of his charm when he was at Columbia, his distinctiveness. His moral dispassion was so confident, that it made him almost equally indifferent to praise and opprobrium.
    “What would you like to do, then?” she asks.
    “What I’d really like is to run something, for God’s sake,” he says with surprising vehemence. “Something large and international. It’s about time … And I would be good at it, too. I am already good at it. Negotiating different interests, playing them off against each other till they fit. I just want to do it on a larger scale.”
    “No matter what.”
    “No matter what.” He looks ill-humored again. “I don’t care which organization I run. As long as it’s important or big. Or both, preferably. Very preferably.”
    “Is there nothing you really care about?” she asks, feeling horribly earnest again.
    “My dear Isabel,” he responds, “I’m a worker in the, how to explain it, the superstructure. ” The precision of his pronunciation makes the word sound almost sexy. “It is not our business to care. It is to see the whole picture. To have the overview.”
    He continues, in answer to her unspoken objections. “All right, I am a bureaucrat. I don’t mind being called that. That’s what we need these days, the best bureaucrats possible. People who are objective. Who don’t get all gooey or sentimental about some … small precious nation. Or some desperately importantissue du jour . People who care so much about one bloody thing as to unbalance the whole … structure.” He raises an amused eyebrow. “That’s why we need a strong superstructure,” he concludes with satisfaction.
    “So there’s nothing really … important in all of this,” she says, uncertainly.
    “Ah, you and your meaning bug,” he says, looking at her amiably again. “You’ve always had it. You’re such an innocent, really. Dear Isabel.”
    As he escorts her to the elevator, he places his hand on the back of her neck lightly, but with unmistakable intention. Without turning round, she shakes her head no. “Is it Peter?” he asks, and she shakes her head again. “Ah, well, then I’m even more disappointed,” he says, as if offering a gallantry.
    “By the way,” she asks, as they wait for the elevator to come down, “who was that Russian woman?”
    “You mean the poetess?” He shrugs, as if it didn’t much matter. “She’s worked at the Russian Embassy for a long time. Pre-perestroika, which is unusual. Mostly, they’ve revised their personnel fairly thoroughly since then. Which means she must be doing something right. Or wrong.”
    The elevator door opens, and Isabel turns to