by Bruce Feiler
Jane, a thin, brown-haired woman in a long brown skirt, spoke next. She was seated in an upright chair to my left—at nine o’clock to my seat at six.
“I must admit something,” she said. “I never cared much for the news. I read a newspaper every now and then. I listen to the radio in my car. But I am going to be married this summer, and my fiancé is in the reserves. Now I can’t ignore this problem anymore. It could be him over there, so now I have to care.” She took a deep breath. “What I discovered was that there are some people in my community who are affected deeply by these events, and I want to know how to comfort them.”
“That’s a very generous remark, Jane. And one that is very important.” Nick leaned forward in his seat. He opened his arms as if parting a book. “I have noticed a split in our community between those who don’t seem to notice the war and those who listen to the news all the time. I wonder if this rift is irreparable?”
“I am one of the junkies,” said a thin boy with spectacles and tennis shoes who was seated across from me—at eleven. His name was Dean. “Since last summer this crisis is all that I have thought about. The reason is that one of my best friends has been living in that area and he spent four months in hiding. If the people who were sheltering him had got caught, they would surely have been shot. This is not an abstraction. This is real. And people are making jokes about it. It hurts to think that people don’t want to fight this war. I want my friend alive.”
“It hurts me, too,” said a woman named Leslie in a green flannel shirt and bright yellow socks who was seated between Amanda and me at four o’clock. “I was in London for a peace march yesterday. I don’t think our country should be at war, and I resent the war being fought in my name. All of this patriotic fervor—the posters on the street, the flags in people’s car windows. I think we have lost our minds and are just following others into war for the sake of our own misconceptions. I came here tonight because I’m upset, because I don’t feel I can stop anything. To me there is not enough of a split.”
“But now our forces are in battle,” said Ben, a handsome public school boy with a crew cut who was seated at two o’clock. “So now we should support them. During my year off I was a member of the Royal Marines. Of course, I never saw any combat, but I expect someday to be among them. I think it is important to back our country. I don’t really know what to think about this conflict and I came here to talk about that. But I do know that we must show support.”
The hole in the pond grew larger.
“I agree with Nick,” I said, finally joining the discussion. “There is a split in our community. And that split makes me frustrated.” I felt the group turn and stare at me, startled by my accent. “I am American, so by sheer force of numbers there are people I know involved. But I am concerned that only those of us who know people directly involved think the war is important, while everyone else doesn’t care. This level of apathy really bothers me. I want to proselytize. I want to grab people by the shoulders and tell them that this matters to them whether they know it or not.”
“But why does it matter?” Amanda asked. “Why should I listen to the radio? What can I do?”
“You can do a lot,” insisted Leslie. “We have the power to stop this. Think of Vietnam. If we protest, our voices can make a difference.”
“Don’t think about Vietnam,” countered Ben. “Think of World War Two. That’s a better example. Before the war I was opposed to the idea of conflict. But now that it has begun, I feel we must show solidarity with our troops. It is impossible to fight a war with everyone second-guessing every decision.”
“I have a real problem with this question of support,” said Nick, for the first time revealing his feelings. “How can I offer my support when I have questions about the cause? I feel very deeply about the casualties. My wife is a doctor, so I know the hospital is preparing hundreds of beds for the wounded. But I know that all the troops, on both sides, have parents, and I feel deeply for them, too.”
“You don’t think about the enemy in battle,” said Jane. “The troops are just doing their jobs. If my fiancé were involved, I would want him to shoot the enemy before they shoot him.”
“Yes, I agree,” said Amanda. “But all of this talk about us versus them makes me very confused. Why do we have to hate the enemy? I remember all the Argie-bashing during the Falklands War. I just have a lot of doubt. I just want to know, well, who do I pray for?”
The question lingered in the pool, rippling through the academic roundtable with the quiet force of doubt. For a moment the circle was muted and the people thrown into indecision. The athletic contests in college were hard-fought and fierce, but ultimately they were friendly. The personal battles for love were heartfelt and strong, but finally they were for pleasure. Even the life-or-death struggles for exams proved in the end to be less than apocalyptic. But the reality of war, like few other events on a university campus, had the power to pierce through the cocoon of isolation and force students to engage their world. At that hour I couldn’t help wondering, could Cambridge be penetrated?
“We must pray for peace,” said Leslie, breaking the silence. “We must take back our government from the military leaders and run it ourselves.”
“I don’t think that’s accurate,” added Ben. “Once the war has begun, we must let our elected officials lead.”
Dean squirmed in his seat. “But some countries have said that if they are attacked they will use enough force to end the conflict.”
Ben sat upright. “Are you implying that one side might use nuclear weapons?”
Dean stared back at him. “Yes.”
“Well, that might be a good idea,” Ben said. “At least it would save casualties.”
“Not their casualties,” Dean countered. “Only ours. Then what have we accomplished?”
“You have taught him a lesson,” Ben asserted. “You have stood up for what you believe.”
Jane, the bride-to-be, raised her finger. “Perhaps if I might be permitted,” she said. “I would like to use a homely metaphor—a family. It seems to me that this situation is like when you are a parent and your child is bad. Even though you love him, you have to punish him so he won’t do it in the future. Although it may hurt a little, it’s the only way.”
“But I don’t love dictators,” said Amanda.
“Yet surely we love his people,” said Nick.
“What about our people?” Leslie said. “We are not parents to the world. When I hear that kind of talk, I notice a paternalistic attitude. We can’t just discipline the rest of the world as if they were a pack of wild dogs.”
“So what do we do?” Ben said. “Do we just let them roam?”
“The world is not that simple,” added Dean. “War is not black and white. We can’t expect to tame the mad dogs out there, because we’re just the same as they are.”
Round and round the sailor’s chest we went—point, counterpoint, press ahead, plant our feet—in a never-ending litany of private concerns.
“What about my fiancé?”
“What about my friend?”
“What about our troops?”
“What about our enemy?”
The conversation was going nowhere. Each of us had learned to express ourselves. We had taken advantage of the interval offered by the university. But despite our well-honed language skills, we had lost the ability to listen. As Thaddeus had hoped, we were all being critics. As I had feared, we were all cut off from one another. We could take apart ideas, but couldn’t build a bridge. We could recreate the war, but couldn’t create peace.
“Wait!” I said after several more minutes of the mind-numbing rhetoric. “We’re fighting the war among ourselves. What happened to the idea of thinking beyond our personal lives—our own identities—to reach out to one another?” I went on to talk about preaching and posturing. My voice was rising higher. My face was turning red. “We’re in a university,” I said. “If we can’t come to an understanding, who can?” My wo
rds came out like a speech of sorts, a ranting plea for reconciliation. When I finished, my voice whirled around the pool for a moment, then Nick leaned forward toward the chest and rubbed his hands together as he had at the start.
“I said at the beginning that we wouldn’t come to any conclusions tonight. We wouldn’t solve any problems.” He smiled and looked around the circle, dissipating the tensions with his charm. My manifesto had failed. “But I thought we could open some lines of communication. We have all mentioned some people that we know are involved in this war, so I would like to take a minute and reflect on what we have said.”
As the group took a moment to pray, I stared at the fruit in the center of the table. In the silence I thought not of the people I knew in the war but of the ones I had just met in the room. We were seven corners of a circle, children of the academy, who couldn’t agree on a simple idea but had agreed to disagree, who had come separately into the group but had not come together, and who would leave the room soothed by the voice of our gentle father but with little wisdom to bear. In the end, the circle reminded me of that bowl of fruit in its center—individuals united by a common family but separated from joining together by thick, distinctive skins. The university—the “conversation”—had brought us together, but our different voices—our different languages—had kept us apart.
“Thank you very much for coming,” Nick said. “May there be peace on earth.”
XII
PARTYING
NARGs from the Underground
Mathematics may be defined as the subject in which we never know what we are talking about, nor whether what we are saying is true.
—Bertrand Russell
Recent Work on Mathematics, 1901
“Hey, Bruce, come inside.”
Terry called out to me from the Porters’ Lodge as I walked into Memorial Court on a dark, dank Friday afternoon. The second term, as Simon predicted, had developed differently from the first. For starters, I opted not to row and concentrated instead on picking up squash, poking around Clare, and preparing for my up-coming exams. Yet when war broke out these priorities shifted. In the midst of real-life international relations, our morning lectures on eighteenth-century weaponry or the causes of Peruvian inflation seemed even more remote than usual. Mr. Langley, our course director, dismissed requests from the class that he assemble the diplomats, generals, and journalists in our program for a roundtable discussion. “We are academicians,” he said, “not therapists. We don’t care about your feelings.”
Dr. Long, my supervisor, also didn’t care about my feelings, though he did, at least, remember my name when I went to see him in early February. “Jolly well,” he said when I proposed my scheme to compare the Allied occupations of Japan and Germany. “It’s not been done. It might be difficult. Bring me an outline at the start of next term.” The biggest change of all, however, was that I spent much less time in V Entryway, after Halcyon returned two weeks into Lent and indicated that she did not intend to speak with me again.
“What is it?” I said to Terry as I stepped into the Lodge.
“You have a message,” he said. “It’s from a chap called Bernard. He’s having a party tonight in Trinity. He said please bring a bottle and some food—what do you say?—midgets, morsels, mouthfuls…”
“Munchies.”
“Yes, that’s it. Please bring a bottle and some munchies. So tell me, what’s a munchy?”
“Well, munchies are different from food,” I said. “Food means turkey or baked potatoes; munchies are cookies or potato chips. Or—how do you say?—biscuits and crisps.”
“I get it. Munchies are party food.”
“That’s right,” I said. “You’re a fast learner.”
“This is good. I’m teaching you how to be an English gentleman—”
“And I’m teaching you how to be an American teenager.”
“No, you’re teaching me how to talk with American tourists. I have occasion to talk to all sorts of people, you know. I’ve said hello to Prince Philip, Prince Charles, and the youngest one, too, Edward. I said hello to him a couple of times when he was at Cambridge. But I don’t want to be a snob. I like to talk to you Colonists as well.”
He laughed uproariously at his own joke, caressing his mustache and patting his bald pate as he did.
“Which reminds me,” he continued, “where did you say Barney was from?”
“California.”
“Ah, California, I should have guessed. I suppose that means he wears sneakers a lot.”
The party was humming when I arrived—a dull, whining, staticky hum like a shortwave radio caught between two stations. Three men wearing polarized glasses and flannel shirts were standing in the corner of the basement room fiddling with a six-piece sound system, which responded to their proddings and provocations with the excruciating cry of a UFO in surgery. The undergound room was unlit, except for a glimmer from an orange streetlight that careened through the horizontal ventilation windows and reflected off the whitewashed walls. Water dripped from the windows in several places and gathered in puddles on the floor.
I hadn’t wanted to come to this party. My exams were several weeks away; Rachel was stuck in Oxford; my dinner of mashed meat and refried potatoes was fossilizing in my stomach. Yet the invitation had intrigued me. I had run into Bernard several times the previous month and he had mentioned he was having a birthday party and that I should come and meet his friends.
“Hey, Bruce-man,” Bernard said as he bounded over to bid me welcome. “Howya doin’? Let me introduce you to my pals.”
Bernard was a Type A Californian. He wore his hair long, his shirt loose, and his pants impossibly tight. He came to his twenty-fourth birthday party dressed in bleached white jeans creased to his crotch, a pink Hawaiian shirt opened to his baby-bare navel, and—indeed—sneakers: red. A Ph.D. student in artificial intelligence and a master chess player, Bernard was trying to write a computer program that could defeat a prodigy like himself in chess. If he succeeded, he would pass and lose his pride; if he failed, he would flunk but feel much better.
“Computers will never beat good humans,” he said. “We have to tell them what to do.”
Bernard, like many childhood computer hackers, had a brain that matured when he was nine but a body that never quite caught up. As a result, he was always eager, often bouncy, and—like a Labrador retriever—invariably ready with the wrong emotion at the right time. He was, in short, a puppy savant. I first met Bernard at a formal dinner at Trinity in the fall, and at that time he told me he was organizing a special group to discuss the correlation between diplomacy and game theory.
“It’s all a matter of the correct syllogism,” he said with the excitement most people reserve for discussing ice cream or sports results. “If I say, ‘Socrates is a man; all men are mortal; therefore Socrates is mortal,’ I make sense, right?”
“Yes.”
“But if I say, ‘Socrates is a goose; all geese are immortal; therefore Socrates is immortal,’ I also make sense, right?”
“I suppose so. But what does this have to do with diplomacy?”
“Well, reality depends on which knowledge base you choose. Socrates is not a goose. A goose is not immortal. So Socrates is not immortal. If diplomacy is based on a false assumption, then the result is war.”
Inside the cellar Bernard led me to the center of the room and a clump of men standing silently in a square.
“I want you to meet Kenneth,” he said, gesturing to a man with curly dark hair and a thick dark beard. “He’s from Trinity. He can beat me in chess.”
There was a pause.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello.”
There was another pause.
“Where are you from?” I asked.
He squinted his eyes and stared blankly at me.
“What do you mean?” he said.
“I mean where did you grow up?”
“You mean where do my parents live?”
<
br /> “This is not a difficult question.”
“I was born in Liverpool.”
“Well,” Bernard said, as if interrupting, “now I will say something about each of you for the others to hear. This is Bruce. He wrote a book about Japan.”
“Oh,” declared Kenneth. “That’s strange.”
“Kenneth also wrote a book,” Bernard said.
There was a pause.
“What’s your book about?” I asked.
He opened his mouth with the gust of a downhill skier who had just taken off and could not be easily stopped. “Computer logistics in a post-Cartesian world—”
“Oh,” I interrupted. “That’s fascinating.”
“This is Sean,” Bernard said, pressing on unawares. “He’s my neighbor. He beats me in Othello.”
“Nice to meet you, Sean.” I stuck out my hand; he wiped his on his jeans and drooped it into mine.
“Do you play?” he asked.
“Do I play what?” I answered.
“Othello.”
“No, but I played Hamlet in high school.”
He stared at me blankly. Clearly, my American wit was still too wet.
“Sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid I haven’t played Othello since high school.”
“Oh,” he sighed. “Too bad.”
“Sean has published ten articles,” Bernard said.
“Actually, it’s only one article,” Kenneth added. “He just keeps rewriting it.”
“So, what do you do?” I asked Sean.
“I write computer programs that translate Swedish into English and play bridge.”
“So you transfer Swedish into English in order to play bridge?”
“No, not exactly. I play bridge in either language.”