Life in the West tsq-1

by Brian W Aldiss

  ‘Although we could not say that Marxism-Leninism had ever a conscience, it was at least a system. But, in effect, nobody now espouses such beliefs in any country of the Eastern bloc because, as a Polish friend of mine said to me, “Nobody can remain in a communist country and be communist.” So this dead doctrine now has power only in the West, on the youth, in effect.’

  The patron arrived with the first intimations offish: cutlery, paper napkins, salt and pepper, a plate of sliced lemon. Morabito fell silent, snatching up his knife and fork as if to defend himself. He spoke again as soon as the patron turned his back.

  ‘Do you gentlemen know of the hatred and bigotry in the Soviet upper echelons? Can you plumb the depths? America is insane, Europe a harlot — that they believe and say. They believe that Bolshevism unites with Russian Orthodoxy to save the world against — you see I must hesitate before I must speak it — the satanic forces of World Zionism.

  ‘That is the new religion that will fill the empty shell of communism — a new anti-Semitism! Anti-Semitism was official policy under the Czars, and soon the calendar will go back and again the Nazi Right wing will proclaim a crusade against the Jewish menace and the builders of the Judaeao-Masonic pyramid in the West. These same neo-Nazis easily combine such racism with a hatred of the Chinese, no problem.’

  He tapped hard on the table with an index finger.

  ‘More bad things are in store for the world than ever before. At present, such things are in effect not possible while there is Brezhnev, for he can hold together the Soviet establishment and operate the bureaucracy between managerial and military pressures. When he’s gone, we see Stalinism come back — yet even Stalin was not always officially against Jews, though whenever he said the word “cosmopolitanism”, then he meant Jews.

  ‘In the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, “Anti- Zionism” was one excuse. Now more evil propaganda is said in the Soviets against the Jews than ever before. Hitler was only an actor, a — what’s the English word? — a strolling player in hatred against the Jewish people; soon you will see the performance lived.’

  The fish was brought, and again Morabito fell silent, watching with glittering eyes as the patron heaped potatoes on his plate. As soon as the man was gone, he burst out again.

  ‘Do you know the name of Valery Nikolayevich Yemelyanov? Do you? A well-known lecturer to the Party on ideological matters? His claim is that the Gentile world was saved by Stalin’s purges from a Jewish putsch to take over the world: Now another conspiracy is being staged. Yemelyanov proposes a new front to stamp out every evidence of Jewish culture everywhere. The class struggle is to be replaced by a more deadly and deep one, the struggle against ethnic classes. Of course, it will give the Soviet Nazis the opportunity they need to eradicate anything or anyone opposing them. It will begin when Brezhnev goes. That will be the history of the twenty-first century, friends — a Final Solution against which Hitler is less than this piece of fish!’

  He fell savagely upon the white flesh before him, as if it were the last meal he would ever eat.

  The other two ate in uneasy silence, perhaps feeling that Morabito was too dramatic.

  Fittich said, ‘Well, the heavens are certainly full of portents these days. Nobody can say we haven’t been warned when Chaos comes again.’

  When it was clear Squire was going to make no answer, Morabito said to him challengingly,’ Do you believe what I am telling you? Because it’s true. Here in Italy, we know — the nerves are bare too long. Much worse things are to come, believe me.’

  Removing a bone from between his teeth, Squire said, ‘Let me tell you the truth, and hope you will not be insulted. I think I can believe what you say concerning Soviet policy, though counter-forces in the Kremlin of which we are unaware may see to it that anti-Semitism does not emerge as you assume at present.

  ‘But I can’t quite believe — though in my darker moments I perversely wish to — that things in general are getting worse. By and large the human condition — at least in Europe — is improving, particularly if you take the calamitous fourteenth century as your base-line. Or the seventeenth, come to that.’

  ‘You’re mincing words,’ Morabito said impatiently, thumping his signed copy of Squire’s book.

  ‘Well, I’m trying not to. But you are talking politically and I am forced to talk…spiritually. Spiritually, I so often feel despite everything that all is well. I don’t believe in God, and perhaps it is simply the biological organism telling me that today it is in good balance, that Ego and Self are in counterpoise — or something like that. Whatever it is, I can’t help listening to it. It’s the closest voice to me. Can you see my difficulty, Morabito? Though worried, I feel content. No offence. It’s a character limitation. Even on the day when my wife walks out and leaves me and I am truly miserable, something inside is chirruping to me, “All’s well, all’s well, and this is the best of all possible worlds.” Believe me, many and many a time — for instance when I listen to you — I feel ashamed of that idiot within.’

  Tess, perhaps it’s that damned complacency in me you can’t bear. It’s attractive at a distance. It attracts women, or the sort of woman who likes contented men. Close at hand, you may find it intolerable. I’ve expected you to be content with me, my love, because I was more or less content with myself.

  It’ll betray me. It has already betrayed me. I believe I’ve got — God, or whatever it is, tucked in the back of my skull. Maybe that’s what betrayed the Jews in Nazi Germany; they couldn’t credit for the life of them that the Nazis hadn’t also got God in their thick skulls…

  Truth kills…?

  7. Land Full of Strange Gods

  Pippet Hall, Norfolk, Christmas 1976

  His mother had cared enough for the Jews to do something positive for them.

  That was in the early summer of 1938 when, as a widow of one year’s standing, she had taken the Normbaum family into the Hall. They were refugees from Hitler’s Third Reich, and had fled from Hamburg leaving almost all their possessions behind. Patricia Ann Squire — supported by her sister, Tom Squire’s Aunt Rose, who was also living at the Hall in those days — had invited the poor Normbaums to stay indefinitely.

  During the Christmas of 1976, Squire thought of those distant pre-war days as he gazed down upon the face of his dead mother.

  Patricia Squire had died during the afternoon of Christmas Eve. Her body would lie in its coffin over Christmas and be consigned to the ground on the twenty-eighth of December, at eleven o’clock in the morning, in the church of St Swithun, Hartisham.

  The sense of the dead body in the house made for a subdued Christmas when, after breakfast on Christmas morning, everyone retired to the morning room for present-giving and receiving. Squire left as soon as he could, and went to sit by the mortal remains of his mother.

  Downstairs were Teresa, the girls, and her parents, Madge and Ernest Davies; Tom’s brother, Adrian; together with Deirdre and Marshall Kaye, Tom’s sister and brother-in-law, who always drove over from Blakeney to stay at Pippet Hall for Christmas, bringing with them their three children, Grace,

  Douglas, and Tom. Uncle Willie would arrive later, after the family had been to church.

  An LP of carols from Norwich Cathedral played on the record player. Nellie the Dalmatian rooted among the discarded wrapping paper.

  Squire waited upstairs in the small room, furnished with little more than the open coffin. Fragments of scripture, platitudinous saws, floated through his mind.

  We are but little time upon this earth.

  What’s done cannot be undone.

  Ashes to ashes.

  Your place is with the living. Join the children downstairs.

  And that old quotation from Walter Savage Landor:

  There are no fields of amaranth on this side of the grave: there are no voices, O Rhodophe, that are not soon mute, however tuneful; there is no name, with whatever emphasis of passionate love repeated, of which the echo is not faint at last. />
  John Matthew Squire, his father, dead so many years, had once cried the name of the red-haired Patricia Ann Hodgkins with all the emphasis of passionate love. Now both were gone, and the echo of that cry could be heard only in his own head, and in the heads of his sister and brother.

  There was no immortality, of that he was certain, or none in the sense that the church intended. Yet there was no death, or at least there was a residue of life. For that vast and perennially never-entirely-satisfactory thing, his relationship with his mother, grievously damaged on the very day of his father’s death by her savage beating of him, ostensibly for shooting the mastiffs — though even at the time, in his many kinds of grief, he perceived that the beating was merely her pain, her confusion in the face of death, her hatred of this unexpected beastliness, which had driven her to attack him — still hung and would ever hang between him and the phantom domains of his past.

  Looking away from his mother’s emaciated form, and her closed face splotched by greys and browns unknown in living nature, he gazed with sorrow on the still world of Christmas outside. A light fall of snow, followed by an iron frost, had welded the previous night’s mist to the trees. Every bare twig had its nimbus of cold. The grass of the lawns was furred with white. It was a white and blue-grey picture. Death seemed to have deprived the world of colour. The still cold had enlarged the plantation and created a deadness in its depths so that it resembled an ancient forest, or perhaps he saw a spectre of it as it would be a century from now, when his eyes and the eyes of his children would no longer perceive it.

  He allowed himself to picture two Shire horses, such as had worked on his father’s estate when he was a boy, pulling a great trunk from the forest, of the trunk being set light to, and of cheerful flames leaping to the ashen sky. Truly, one could understand how, long before a sailing ship and a pious old man in monk’s habit had brought Christianity to these shores, men had set out with animals to drag in the yule log and burn it, ensuring that the death of the sun in the embers of winter solstice was temporary merely, not lasting.

  But the sun was dead, he thought. Every year it did die a little. Though less swiftly than he.

  The door opened and Teresa entered in her Sunday clothes. Patricia Squire’s body had been brought in its coffin to a small room on the top floor, which had served in its time as maid’s room, children’s room, and box room. The passage outside was thinly carpeted and Squire had heard his wife’s footsteps approaching.

  Teresa was dressed in a light coat with fur-trimmed pockets. She wore a fur hat which haloed her hair, and carried gloves. Her smile was warm and loving.

  ‘We’re ready to go to church, Tom, if you are.’

  He rose hesitantly. She went over to him where he stood by the window and put her arms about him, running her hands through the hair at the base of his skull, murmuring to him.

  ‘I’m sorry about your poor old mother, my darling. It’s sad for you, I know. And it wakens up that old wound of your father dying so tragically. I know that too because I’m a part of you. Don’t grieve too much, darling — I’ll be your little mother as well as your plump little wife. We’ll be fine, you’ll see.’

  They all walked to church as they always did, through the ringing cold, down the drive, over Repton’s bridge, along the village street, up the hill, to St Swithun’s, twelve of them where there had been thirteen the previous year. Several cars were parked outside the church, including the Porsche belonging to Ray Bond, the flashy builder who had bought the vicarage. The five-minute bell was ringing as they walked between the gravestones, the children, who had led the way impatiently until now, dragging behind.

  Inside the church, where worshippers retained their coats to ward off the damp which the massively old-fashioned Victorian heating system did little to dispel, brass plates commemorated the names of the fallen who had given their lives for the country in two world wars. Names of Squires and Hodgkinses were prominent. The organ, which was delivering a voluntary based on, or aspiring towards, Hoist’s ‘Christmas Day’, under the skeletal fingers of Mr Beaumont, had been presented by the Squire family to commemorate the fallen.

  Tom Squire’s first sight of the Normbaums had revealed huddled figures in ill-fitting overcoats, staggering into the hall of Pippet Hall, late on a summer evening before the war. Spinks, the Squire’s old stableman, brought in a couple of battered cardboard boxes and set them down by the stairs, leaving without a backward look. Young Squire had not understood the alien gestures of the newcomers. He had immediately understood Spinks’s unthinking gesture of dislike and disapproval. He stood on the stairs, refusing his mother’s invitation to come down, resenting this intrusion of foreign things into his home, this threat of coming war into Hartisham, into his county of Norfolk.

  Why should they look so ugly, why should they dress so incongruously, when this super, kind, rich English family was letting them stay here, safe from Hitler, free, no charge? Why couldn’t they look grateful instead of scared?

  He had long since forgiven himself that ungenerous reception of the Normbaums, and his flight upstairs into the bedroom when his mother called him peremptorily down to greet their guests. What had been less easy to forgive, what perhaps should never be quite forgiven, but should lie about in the mind like a dead albatross, a warning for all worse and more subtle situations to come, was the way he had secretly sympathized with Hitler’s — well, in those days one did not realize it was extermination — Hitler’s extirpation of the Jews.

  In the newsprints and on newsreels, ground out in the local fleapit before the appearance of Humphrey Bogart, or Eddie G. Robinson, or Will Hay, or Errol Flynn, Hitler looked rather nice and sensible in his uniform. Tom could not believe what Uncle Robert said about Hitler being a ‘villain of the first water’. But he disliked the look of the German Jews, seen scuttling here and there in heavy clothes, dirty, drab, suspicious, the men with matted black beards and strange hats, the women fat and weepy. Their eyes were so frightening. Why should they inhabit Germany? It seemed a good idea to get rid of them if they were causing trouble, as everyone said they were.

  Now here these troublemakers were in his own house, in father’s house, and father would surely never allow that. Already the trouble was starting. He had had to exchange his pleasant big room next to his mother’s for a smaller room on the top floor, redeemed only by its stunning view over the rear of the house, the stables, the farm, the village, and the distant tower of Thornage church. Rooks and pigeons were his companions.

  Mr Normbaum spoke good English. He was cosmopolitan. But he disappeared almost as soon as he had deposited his wife and children at the Hall. The wife spoke almost no English, the two children, Rachel and little Karl, none. Memory, which after a while proves to have none of the fading properties of the body enshrining it, still held that scene in the hall, under the chandelier, with the door in the background open on sunset sky: S pinks balefully moving away, waistcoated figure averted, mother going forward, arms open in smiling welcome, tall Mrs Normbaum, two ill-clad little children looking up apprehensively into the shadows to where something scuttled away.

  It took some days to realize how beautiful those children were, the blue-eyed Rachel in particular.

  During the sermon, the Rev. Rowlinson mentioned Patricia Squire, in order to remind his scanty parishioners of the good she had done in her lifetime. He had occasion to mention the fact that she had given refuge to a Jewish family in the troubled days before the last war broke out.

  ‘All times in this realm of earth are troubled. Although it may seem to our eyes that the kinds of troubles vary, that we have to fight against various sorts of evil, that is only because our mortal lives are so short. Could we but look at matters with a wider scan, had we the vision of the Almighty, we would see that there is really only one sort of evil, that evil puts on many guises, yet remains itself, and that it is in us all. Patricia Squire worked all her life against evil…’

  Limitations of intellect did no
t prevent the Reverend Rowlinson being a good vicar; indeed, perhaps they helped him. But what he said was only partly true, or only partly useful. For, given the brevity of life’s span to which he made reference (a snide but traditional way the Church had of making you depressed and therefore not so actively bad), one had to make ad hoc arrangements against evil; so it suited all and sundry to chop evil up into parcels and, by pretending it was divisible, remain able to divide and conquer it. Given a bit of luck.

  For instance, there was the evil of ignorance, such as the young Tom Squire showed in his lack of sympathy for Hitler’s suffering Jews. That lack had been banished when he was in his teens and acquired knowledge. The dreadful revelation of Belsen and the other concentration camps, which almost coincided with the first flush of puberty, jarred him like the passing of a terrible express train. It had jarred him with knowledge. As an earthquake levels tall buildings, he felt whole edifices of ignorance fall within him. He saw the wickedness of the Nazi regime and — on a par with it if knowledge cannot be quantified, as old Rowlinson appeared to be claiming — his own wickedness. (Yet the wickedness lived even in its own ruins. How grateful he had been when he read Orwell’s words, ‘I could never find it in my heart to dislike Hitler.’ He wondered if all the British felt that way. Hadn’t they said, even at the sour end of the war, ‘We should have joined up with the Wehrmacht and smashed the Russians while we had the chance’… The things that were said, between individuals, between husband and wife, seemingly so transient, never forgotten… ‘I’ll be your little mother as well as your plump little wife…’)

  As the sermon laboured on, Squire’s attention wandered. His younger brother Adrian sat on one side of him, Teresa on the other, in the family pews. In a niche on the wall just above them stood a bust in white marble of Matthew Squire, 1689-1758, one of the benefactors of the church. Anxious, in his nouveau riche state, to keep in with the Church as well as the local gentry, Matthew had endowed the church with a fine wooden pulpit, carved by William Kent, no less, probably from timber left over from the construction of the Hall.