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by Henry A. Kissinger 77

A strong Europe was bound to present a challenge to American leadership. But by couching this challenge so woundingly, de Gaulle has spurred American self-righteousness rather than the objective reexamination of Atlantic relationships which the situation demands.

History will probably demonstrate that de Gaulle's conceptions—as distinct from his style—were greater than those of most of his critics. But a statesman must work with the material at hand. If the sweep of his conceptions exceeds the capacity of his environment to absorb them, he will fail regardless of the validity of his insights. If his style makes him unassimilable, it becomes irrelevant whether he is “right” or “wrong.” Great men build truly only if they remember that their achievement must be preserved by the less gifted individuals who are likely to follow them.

Though de Gaulle has performed enormous feats in lifting his country's sights almost by an act of will, there are objective limits which great and strong-willed statesmanship may extend but cannot change altogether. De Gaulle's insistence that France and the United States are equal is true in a moral sense but, if pushed too far, it must bring into the open a permanent

disparity of strength. In any collision the superiority of American resources is likely to prevail regardless of the validity of the competing views. By generating so much personal ill will among American leaders, de Gaulle may rend the fabric of illusion on which his policy depends. The irony of Franco-American rivalry is that de Gaulle has conceptions greater than his strength, while United States power has been greater than its conceptions.

In the meantime, there is something of a Greek tragedy about the dispute between the United States and France. Each chief actor, following the laws of his nature, is bringing about consequences quite different from those intended. Either the “American” or the “French” concept of the Atlantic relationship might have succeeded. Competing as they do—with no comprehension of the real intention of the other—they may bring on what each side professes to fear most: a divided, suspicious Europe absorbed once again in working out its ancient rivalries. Tragedy, to many Americans at least, is to find oneself thwarted in what is ardently desired. But there is another and perhaps more poignant tragedy, that of fulfilling one's desires and then finding them empty.

## Semblances

by Howard Moss

Here is the shadow circle of a tree.
It is more than tree. It is more than sun.
The darkness in it sheds its casualty
Of green, and what we see we do not see:
Its light-leaved tameness is the strength of wild
Embezzlements of flower, bird, and child.

The thinness, thickness of a thing is not
The thing itself. I watch the water change
From color into color, watch the tree
Transpose the rarest of transparencies
Into the heavy gravity of fall.
I see the golden pockets take their fill.

The world is stained by what is not the world.
Floating on the high relief of summer,
The clouds have flawed the mirror of the sea,
And beyond the clouds, what darkening of mind
Secretes the twilight as we turn around,
And, filtered out of vision, comb the wind?

Harper's Magazine, March 1965

# A Brotherly Cruise on the Black Sea

by George Feifer

A young American sailing from Yalta to Odessa discovers a Russia unmentioned in the guidebooks and carefully ignored in official communiqués.

A white ship, oxidized white, with a gray-white stack trimmed in broad red stripes and small gold hammers and sickles. The *Peter the Great*, 8,209 tons, median in luxury among the Soviet Black Sea cruise fleet. A small old ship, respectably worn, reasonably dirty. A cruise ship like other cruise ships, petit bourgeois.

She was built—said a deckhand on the fo'c'sle—in 1926 in Hamburg and sold to Italy in the 'thirties; Poland got her as reparations after the war and sold her later to Russia. No, built—declared the First Officer from the barber's chair—in 1937 by a German yard for Turkey and never delivered because of the war; England took her as reparations from Germany in 1946 and sold her to Poland, who traded her immediately to Russia in return for a tanker. No, built in 1939—the ship's electrician whispered, for some reason, in my ear—in Bremen for an English firm; Turkey bought her after the war and sold her later to Poland, who used her eight years as a transatlantic liner; Russia “got it” from the Poles. A mysterious ship; labels on the valves stamped in German, Turkish, Russian, and

English. Length 402 feet; beam 54 feet; 350 places in luxe, first, second, and third classes, plus deck space for a hundred in fourth—young workers taking in the palmy Crimean resorts as cheaply as possible.

We were churning on Odessa at thirteen knots from Yevpatoriya in the Crimea. Before that it had been Yalta, Novorossisk, Sochi, and Sukhumi: the traditional Black Sea route. The water was deep indigo, the sky was clear. The coast looked like Spain's from the Mediterranean.

*Peter the Great* rode steady on a steady sea; she might have been drifting except for the pleasant pulsing of old turbines. She was a friendly ship, not a smart ship, carelessly warm like a Russian sitting room. Breakfast was over—there had been no servings and no assigned tables. One ate where one chose, first class or second, and I had found myself next to an aeronautical engineer returning slowly, sadly to Moscow from three weeks of swimming in Gagra. Now, on deck, newspapers were opened, letters started, and measured walks paced in everyday clothes along the once holystoned oak. A quiet ship, with no trace of Miami.

In the shade of the half-deck over the pool, three Ukrainian peasant girls sang sweet-sad peasant songs. They had been there since early morning, endlessly wailing, chanting, sighing melancholy folk melodies in that captivating Slavic dissonance, half-Oriental, repetitive, hyp-