When I read about the accident that killed him, I thought, It was a good life, well lived. I wept, on and off, for days.
You might be surprised that Winston Churchill was the last person who came to mind as I cast about for someone who could assist Karl’s family. When you know that Churchill led Britain through the dark days of the Second World War, it’s hard to keep in mind that he spent the years between the two global conflicts without much influence. His party was out of power, and he was relatively unimportant within it. Even among Tories, it must be said, Winston was widely disliked.
In France and Britain and America, we were simply sick of war. Our dead soldiers needed no freshly slaughtered company. Governments around the world were strapped for cash and beset by troubles, left and right. The Depression had impoverished so many; most people were struggling day by day to keep body and soul together. As odious as Herr Hitler was, the very thought of another war with Germany was unbearable. And frankly, so was Winston’s tedious insistence that such a war was inevitable and that it would be better undertaken sooner than later.
Unlike some war lovers I could name, Winston had actually served under fire; unlike most combat veterans, he had relished the experience and never washed his war paint off. You will say that he was right about Hitler, that appeasement was wrong; in the end, the Second World War was a necessary struggle. Too true, but you should also know that going to war was always Winston Churchill’s first resort. Even a stopped clock gives the time correctly twice a day, as the saying goes. You’re still better off with a clock that actually works, in my opinion.
Anyway, I did write to him about helping “my friend Miss Sarah Weilbacher and her mother.” Several weeks later, he replied with a promise that he would see what he could do. “Clemmie sends her regards,” he wrote in closing, “and Thompson says it’s been too long between riots. Do visit, if you can.”
I never heard from him again—not surprising, considering what he had on his plate as war came closer. Nor did I hear from Fräulein Weilbacher after the spring of 1940. I continued to write to her, apprising her of my continuing efforts on her behalf, trying to keep her spirits up. When I wrote in April, the letter was returned marked with the German equivalent of “Addressee unknown.”
Perhaps Karl’s widow and daughter did make their way to safety in Palestine. Perhaps Sarah married and had children. Maybe now, when she tells her sabra grandchildren stories about her escape from Nazi Germany, she mentions the American lady who convinced Winston Churchill to help her get to Israel, and that’s why my name is remembered. I know the odds are horrifyingly against it, but I would like to think that’s how things turned out.
If she survived, Sarah must be quite elderly now. Even the youngest of my little library friends are getting on in years. I don’t have much time left, I expect, and to tell the truth? That’s fine with me. Even General Bonaparte has stopped being smug about the longevity of his fame.
You see, we seem to have a sort of aerial view of the world from here. There’s nothing much to do, so we spend a great deal of time watching human history as though it were a sort of film projected on the shifting misty air around us. It was fascinating—at first.
I was sadly amused, for example, to observe how things turned out for the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s. Relentlessly unlucky with the history they were born into, they fought two world wars and bore the brunt of the Depression. With their savings wiped out, many were forced in old age to move in with their grown children. Ancient flappers and decaying swells would shake their heads as their serious sons and respectable daughters raged at teenagers for dabbling in illicit drugs, thoughtless sex, “jungle” music, and lewd dancing.
“Why, we used to drink until everyone was falling down, peeing-on-the-carpet, puking-in-the-streets drunk!” the Lost would mutter, recalling the bootlegging, the jazz, and the parties that went on all night. “How could we have raised such stiffs?”
I myself lived long enough to see the defeat of the tyrants of World War II. Before I died, I thought that people had learned some enduring lessons from the stupendous carnage of that war. The United Nations was formed, and it appeared that the world’s wisest men and women would gather together and find ways to bring reason to bear on their differences. After all that suffering and destruction, I honestly believed people had finally learned to value peace and progress and prosperity.
When I expressed such sentiments in the afterlife, General McClellan laughed at me. (Oh! I forgot to mention it, but he’s here, too. Did you know George McClellan had a great interest in the Middle East? He visited the region shortly after the American Civil War and drank from the Nile during a barge excursion to Luxor.) “You just watch,” he said cynically. “It’ll turn out to be a swindle.”
Francis agreed, with a weary sigh. “Usually the next war is being planned before the ink on the treaty is dry.”
“Peace is the womanish pursuit of cowards,” Ptolemy declared. “My sister put an asp to her breast and died for love. She should have murdered Marc Antony and fought to reclaim Egypt’s glory.”
“At least you died fighting,” General Bonaparte said. “Real men,” he informed me, “will always choose peril and power.”
Not always, but consistently enough. Observing human history has turned out to be a terrible exercise in monotony.
As Mr. Mark Twain observed long ago, there’s hardly a square yard of land anywhere on earth that’s in the possession of its original owners, and I suppose that’s true. The dead don’t blush, but I would if I could when I think how I lectured Winston about colonialism, for my own country rests on the whitening bones of countless Indians. Nobody’s hands are clean. We might not rape and kill and pillage personally, but an awful lot of us were happy to inherit the stolen goods.
Poor Francis has witnessed the cycle for centuries. Armies arrive and lay claim to somebody else’s land. Generations suffer humiliation, theft, and murder. The dispossessed call upon their gods to witness this injustice; theirs is a righteous anger and so retaliation is sacred, for it is meant to redress an affront to all that’s holy. “Savages!” the conquerors cry then. “These rebels are devoid of human morality. We have no choice but to hunt them down and kill them like the wild beasts they are.” They always claim that they have no choice, but what are they doing there in the first place?
“You can see why God weeps,” Francis often says. “How sad, to grant free will and see it used so poorly.”
I haven’t told Francis, because he might be upset by the idea, but I’ve come to pity God, who has observed our kind for millennia, not merely decades, as I have, or centuries, like Francis. The good Lord must find our world a brutally disappointing place.
If He exists at all …
I’m sorry to have to tell you this, but apart from the steadfast faith I see in Francis, there is no sign here of the deity my sister, Lillian, worshipped. Far more in evidence are the gods of war, whom I once assumed were merely mythical: Mars, Ares, Thor. Indra, Guan Yu, Wotan. Ogun. Ashur, the Morrigan. Huitzilopochtli, Bishamon, Sekh-mut … All of them are real, and in their numberless hordes, they watch human history with gleeful satisfaction.
Here, along the Nile, Mentu the Falcon-Headed seems to be in charge. “The children of men may prate of peace and mewl of love, but anyone can see the truth,” he roars, lifting his great feathered arm toward his legions. “They worship us!”
I wish I could argue, but the twentieth century certainly didn’t provide much evidence to deploy. I’ve come to believe that Mr. William James was right. (He’s not here, by the way. I just remember what he wrote.) Most people welcome war. Rare and precious as it is, peace seems boring and banal by comparison. People believe easily that battle is a sacrament with young men the necessary sacrifice. They believe darkly that without war’s mystical blood payment, society goes soft and rots from within. And most of them can be swayed by lofty rhetoric and crafty slogans. As war approaches, Mr. James wrote, nations experience a vagu
e, religious exultation. That’s when the blood-red gods begin to dance. “I am Empire,” Mentu howls as the others whirl in ecstasy. “I am the King of Thieves!”
The irony is that each new war begins in hope: hope of restoring lost honor, hope of redressing injustices and reclaiming tarnished glory, hope of a grand new world. Each war ends with the black seeds of the next war sown: honor newly lost, injustice freshly inflicted, a world more broken than before. Always, someone steps forward, ready to water and weed and harvest those black seeds, dreaming of the day when they will bring forth their bounty of vindictive vindication. Into that dreamer’s ear, a bloodred god whispers, “Offer flattery in one hand, fear in the other. Rule or be ruled! Dominate or disappear!”
The rationales warp and twist and shift. The closer war comes, the simpler and stupider the choices. Are you a warrior or a coward? Are you with us or against us?
“All men dream,” Colonel Lawrence wrote, “but not equally. Those who dream by night wake in the day to find that it was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, to make it possible.”
“It’s the dreamers who do all the damage,” I decided as we watched yet another reckless rush toward calamity. “I swear, the world would be better off without them! You know what I’m starting to think? If you meet a dreamer of the day, you should wait until he sleeps again, and then just—just shoot him in the head!”
Francis stared, not so much aghast as disappointed.
“Well, that’s what the Bible tells us,” I said, defending myself. “It’s in Deuteronomy. ‘If there arise among you a dreamer of dreams, a false prophet who arises among you, thou shalt not harken unto him and neither shall thine eye pity him, but thou shalt kill him!’ ”
With half-closed eyes, Francis began to recite, “I have a dream … I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will sit down together at the table of brotherhood. I have a dream that one day all of God’s children—black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics—”
“—will join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ ” General McClellan finished with him.
“Oh, my,” I said.
“There were those who believed the Reverend King was a dangerous man,” Francis reminded me, “and someone killed him for his dream.”
“All right then, what about Hitler?” I said.
“Gandhi,” Francis countered.
“Pol Pot!”
“Mandela.”
“So how can we tell the false prophets from the true?” I asked.
“By their deeds shall you know them,” George McClellan said. “Wait and see.”
“Wait and see,” Napoleon mimicked in a prissy voice. “That’s why Lincoln fired you.”
“And in the meantime, the damage is done!” I cried.
No one answered.
There was some excitement a little while ago. The ghost Nile has currents and eddies, just as the real river does. Every now and then someone new washes up. George spotted a man wearing antique armor climb onto the foggy bank, across the water. Ptolemy says the armor is Greek. He thinks the man might be Alexander the Great, so he and George have been trying to attract the newcomer’s attention. General Bonaparte is sulking. Just between you and me? I don’t think he wants the competition.
The idea of another soldier among us is making Francis restless, but I’ve begun to hope we can lure someone new to our group, if for no other reason than to distract our two generals from what’s happening among the living.
General Bonaparte has been particularly agitated lately. “Non, non, non!” he’ll cry. “Imbeciles! You cannot win against an insurgency that way! Mon Dieu! Doesn’t anyone study the Peninsular War anymore?”
“This is going to be a military blunder as catastrophic as your invasion of Russia,” George predicted.
You can imagine how well that went over with Napoleon. Things have been pretty tense since then.
I’m sure you’ve realized that Karl Weilbacher was tragically wrong about his own nation but largely right about the Cairo Conference. Black seeds were sown, and I’m afraid you’re still bringing in the harvest. Rarely has so much been decided by so few to the detriment of so many as in that fancy hotel back in 1921. I thought at the time that Winston and his Forty Thieves were a high-handed, arrogant bunch, and I knew the Cairo Conference was significant when I stood on its edges. I never imagined that decisions made then would dictate history for a hundred years or more, or that America would get tangled up in it all.
I guess it’s easy for some people to convince themselves, as Mumma always did, that they’re doing something nice for others, something they suppose others must truly yearn for, something anyone ought to be thrilled and grateful to receive. And perhaps others do want it, or maybe they don’t, but people on the receiving end can’t help feeling that they should have been asked before somebody charged in and bestowed it. Naturally, people are resentful of ham-handed efforts to run their affairs for them, especially when they can plainly see a benefactor’s ulterior motives. And even when you mean well? Sometimes things are just none of your business.
“Americans have always looked at the Middle East and seen themselves in a mirror,” George McClellan told me recently. In his opinion, “Anyone could have predicted how all this would turn out.”
Well, I didn’t, but I certainly know something about gazing into the mirror of infatuation. Eventually it shatters, and you’re left with nothing but broken glass.
Francis says he’s fed up with the generals and wants to know if Rosie and I would like to try moving upstream. I’m thinking about it, but I may wait a while longer. This bend of the river seems to collect military people, and I am still hoping to run into Colonel Lawrence. Surely his name is remembered, and I can’t imagine that he never drank from the Nile.
Which sort of dreamer was he? I wonder. He seems to have concluded that he was a dreamer of the day, and hated himself for it, but I don’t think it was Lawrence’s fault that things are such a mess in the Middle East. There were many forces at work. He did his best, not that good intentions count for much.
The Arabs he lived among had every opportunity to shoot him while he slept and bring his head to the Turks for that enormous reward. They understood that Lawrence was for them, not merely using them for his own purposes. His dream was that they could be more fully and truly themselves, not just darker reflections of himself in the mirror of infatuation.
Maybe that’s the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes.
A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.
Well! I was hoping I could end my little story by saying something wise and uplifting, and I’m afraid that might be about the best I can do. Perhaps if I’d read more philosophy when I had the chance, I’d have something more impressive to leave you with but, you see, I just taught fifth grade and lived my own little life. When it comes down to it, I don’t have much in the way of advice to offer you, but here it is:
Read to children.
Vote.
And never buy anything from a man who’s selling fear.
Oh, dear. It might be too late now, but one last thing? Try not to remember my name.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Dreamers of the Day is fiction. I have changed a few dates and historical details to make the narrative work, but it was my intent that readers looking for fact not be led far astray. As often as possible, I let histor
ical figures write their own dialogue.
I would like to mention sources I found especially useful while writing the novel. Assignment: Churchill by Walter H. Thompson (New York: Farrar, Straus and Young, 1955) is a funny and informative behind-the-scenes book about Winston Churchill. The Cairo Conference section is short, but since Thompson had just begun work as Churchill’s bodyguard, his impressions of great men and affairs of state were fresh and bracingly irreverent. I also drew upon Thompson’s eyewitness accounts of the Gaza riot and events in Jerusalem. Winston Churchill’s enthusiasm for oil painting can be found in his 19 21 essay “Painting as a Pastime,” which was republished in his book Thoughts and Adventures (London: Butterworth, 1932). I found Desert Queen by Janet Wallach (New York: Doubleday, 1996) an insightful biography of Gertrude Bell. I recommend Images of Lawrence by Stephen Tabachnick and Christopher Matheson (London: Jonathan Cape, 1988) as an excellent and concise analysis of the many biographies and opinions of T. E. Lawrence.
Celandine Kennington’s remembrance of Lawrence’s kindness to her after she suffered a miscarriage, which I made use of in Lillian Cutler’s letter to her sister, Agnes, can be found in T. E. Lawrence by His Friends, edited by A. W. Lawrence (New York: Doubleday, 1937). That book provides essays by dozens of people who knew Lawrence. In aggregate, the essays portray a versatile and complex man, and I relied on them more than on any formal biography, since Agnes’s reactions to the man would have been similarly personal.
A. Edward Newton’s A Tourist in Spite of Himself (Boston: Little, Brown, 1930) was a gold mine of incident and attitude, and the source of Karl’s observations regarding national character in the 1920s. I also made use of a variety of Middle East travel memoirs from the early twentieth century. These sources included Nomad’s Land by Mary Roberts Rinehart (New York: George H. Doran, 1926); The Innocents Abroad by Mark Twain (New York: Signet Classics–New American Library, 1966); Things Seen in Egypt by E. L. Butcher (London: Seeley, Service, n.d.); Crusader’s Coast by Edward Thompson (London: Ernest Benn, 1929); and On Mediterranean Shores by Emil Ludwig (Boston: Little, Brown, 1929).
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