Here, in this place, Schoenberg could not have begun the least measure of a career. Here, no one minds if you prefer Delius, a man who caught syphilis in Florida where he tried to grow oranges, and with whose work Thomas Beecham insisted on waxing the public ear. Once, when I pretended to be a fan, one of my colleagues, whose name I shall protect better than he will mine, followed me into this absurdity like an antelope fleeing danger with his flock, grateful to believe I had finally given up on Maestro Twelve Tones, because, had I maintained my interest, the copycat would have had to sustain his … an unpleasantly taxing fate. Was not my Delius period a generous gesture?
You never liked Schoenberg.
My life has been full of generous gestures. I never put myself forward. I loved background better than Romeo did Juliet. My opinions, sirs, were used merely to warn trespassers away. To secure myself from quizzers and their quizzes. Even so, with my colleagues I was able to play touché.
To steal cheap seeds. How low to stoop.
I must say the college is a lousy landlord. It let that small mansion become a big shack. You bribed me with its formerly grand piano. My mother and I are not responsible for the mess you might find if you ever examined the premises, for your neglect encourages ours. I could give you a list, given a little time, of the ways in which it’s wanting, the repairs that need urgently to be made. I can’t afford to make them at the salary I’m paid.
Your mother had to garden with a screwdriver and a spoon.
And the piano is a bad joke. Keys are chipped. One is silent. The rest are out of tune. I think faculty should be allowed to take recordings home. The library doesn’t carry Jacques Barzun’s book on Hector Berlioz. In the winter, the damn steam radiators clang and clatter in the midst of my class listening to “Clair de Lune.” By the way, you don’t have David Oistrakh’s violin version.
You never liked Schoenberg.
I did so. At least two-thirds of me did. That’s more than most people.
You hate humanity. You are an opponent of man’s natural way of life. What have you finally to say?
I don’t know if beauty is still possible in this world.
41
It was not strictly kosher, but Professor Skizzen managed to run off thirty copies on the college Xerox machine of the following list he had, over years, composed. Although he was, himself, in no hurry to advertise the existence of the Inhumanity Museum, in case of death or injury he might change his mind and allow a few special friends and respected visitors limited access. All of his careful notes, literally hundreds, were on small, easily filed, but not easily copied, cards. Whenever he undertook to classify all the ways human beings have killed or injured one another, he felt dizzy from the impossibilities that faced him. If wars were human necessities or at least habits of long standing, how could he call them unnatural, inhuman, or basically unethical. Could the inevitable be immoral? It would be like saying it was wrong to have two arms.
A SELECTION OF NEWS ITEMS ON 2 × 5 CARDS
416 b.c. Athens besieges the island colony of Melos, an ally of Sparta, during the Peloponnesian War. Melos is chosen for its particular weakness and to prove to others the power of Athens. The Melians refuse to surrender because it would look bad on their résumé (they were a shame society) and result in slavery for their citizens. The Athenians decimate the population by killing the men and boys, taking the women into service, and later repopulate the place with their own kind.
149–146 b.c. Weakened by its victory at Cannae during the Second Punic War, the Romans, who simply outlasted their foe, burned Carthaginian ships, the pride of the sea, in their own harbor, then murdered the men, raped the women, and rampaged each street. Fifty thousand were sold into slavery, although, with such a plentiful harvest, prices could not have been advantageous. Emptied of all contents, the city was razed and left in shards and shatters, but scholars (the pen exceeding the sword once again) waited until the nineteenth century to salt the very earth the city once stood on. It made for a better story. I can only agree.
339. Because, among the Jews and the Magi, the number of Assyrians was, in clear evidence, multiplying, a firman was issued (possibly called a fatwa now) that doubled their taxes. Mar Shimun, head of the Assyrian cities of Seleusa and Ctesiphon, refused to enforce this levy, so it was carried out by collectors of particular violence and brutality in the hope that the Christians would abjure their religion in order to escape taxation and mistreatment. Just in case they did not, on the morning of Good Friday, 339, he had Shimun arrested for treason, all Assyrian vessels seized by the government, priests and ministers put to the sword, and churches torn from their moorings in the earth.
1200 et passim. Genghis Khan carried out mass murders in many of the cities he conquered, Baghdad, Samarkand, Urgench, Vladimir, and Kiev among them. Afterward, he appeared in several inferior films I have been forced by my mother to see.
1850–1890. Having infected the natives of America with smallpox, pushed them from their hunting grounds, thrashed them thoroughly in small engagements over many years, broken numerous treaties and agreements, the colonists resorted to death marches and emaciating dislocations over a period of nearly fifty years (the Trail of Tears that followed the Indian Removal Act in 1830 rid us of four thousand). Feeling a bit ashamed about collecting more scalps than the barbaric tribesmen, the white man made amends with bad booze, attic rugs, and baby rattles. The final indignity, in our present age, is permission we have given to the tribes to oversee and profit from tawdry gambling casinos erected on their reservations. Liquor and various drugs are available at cut rates, especially near borders. Speaking of borders, Dominican dictator Trujillo ordered all cattle-rustling Haitians, living close to the republic’s legal edges, be eliminated. Twenty to thirty thousand were—more than the number of cattle. Haitians speak a sort of French, Dominicans a pretty good Spanish, but the nationalities may otherwise be indistinguishable. The test chosen by their murderers was to require their suspect to identify a sprig of parsley: what is this? Instead of our present choice of curly or flat, Haitians would either say persil or pèsi instead of the Dominican perejil. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired to inspect their prey for circumcisions. Australians treated their indigenous populations rather as Americans did. They began with measles and smallpox, concluded with sabering, burning, and shooting. Tasmanian aborigines were nearly exterminated, but, like the buffalo, have since made a comeback, so all is well. Some claim our pacification program in the Philippines (1902–13), using cholera to do most of the damage, killed more than a million Filipinos, some of whom were actually dissidents. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired by these advances in germ warfare to encourage families of malarial mosquitoes to set up shop in the Pontine Marshes where they produced ninety-eight thousand cases in only two years. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired by their own example in German South-West Africa. They gave to history its first case, it is claimed, of state-organized genocide, led by a man perfectly named for it—General Lothar von Trotha. Two ethnic groups made up the colony’s population. The general removed 80 percent of one but scarcely 50 percent of the other. [Required two cards]
1639–1651. Cromwell’s army invaded Ireland to deny Royalists their farms and to put many of these properties in Protestant hands, at the same time preventing them from serving as a base for the return of the Crown to England. Colonization was indeed a British habit. When the French explored the New World they built outposts to facilitate trade; when the Spanish did so, after the initial slaughter, they settled in among the natives, often marrying them; but when the British arrived they drove the Indians away and built houses for themselves and handsome sideboards for their manners. This was not a new strategy but a successful one, except in Ireland’s case. Nazis were no doubt similarly inspired to repopulate Poland, as the Israelis to enlarge Zion. The Irish were encouraged to remain bitter by British behavior during the potato famine of 1845–49. The Brits outpaid the Irish for their own crop, vesseled the potato
es away, and left the people to starve. Stupid, stubborn, slippery: the British do not own these qualities, but in England’s case, they built an empire with them. The Irish moved to big-city America where they became cops. In their spare time, some rioted with German immigrants over saloon hours.
1793–1796. A part of France called Vendée was a persistent arena of religious conflict. It is difficult to separate the killing and maiming that takes place during a war with the sort that qualifies for the Inhumanity Museum. They didn’t want to pay taxes. (I’ve heard that before.) This time the tax was to be paid by their church. Economics and religion will always set a place blazing. At first, supporters of the church and Crown prevailed, the insurgency seemed on the point of success; but the new bloodthirsty Republican state sent a huge army to “pacify” the region by killing most of the people in it. Until these ruffians arrived, there was not enough “inhumanity” to qualify it for membership. Women and children, houses and municipal buildings, flags and symbols, were all equally eradicated. Beliefs had sharp queries run through them, but beliefs, however stupid or foolish or bizarre, have no more material a body than God himself. They cannot be so easily destroyed, and always outlive their believers, if only in quaint volumes and old tomes. There they lie until some half-wit gives them animation.
What was truly shocking about his collection was not how many humans were reported murdered, but how many murderers were humans. Some of their victims were shot by revolvers in the safety of the home, others were run over by cars, still others knifed when knives were the instruments of choice, or poisoned by fouled water because feces were as popular as mustard. A special salute was due those who were allowed to lie down in the rows of their infertile fields and left to starve. How about the accommodating who hung themselves in closets—quite a few—both victim and victor, hardly fair. Rope should be forbidden, the pistol people felt, in order to prevent the advantage hanging has, but bullets can be bitten, even chewed, when triggered by a resolute finger. Walk into a pond with rocks in your pocket. It is a laundered death. Best of all, a few pills in a water glass can be counted on to shroud consciousness with a milky cloud. You die of kindness. Millions of us seem to find ordinary life so foul we must soften our sorrows with drugs or drink or acquisition, perhaps Madame Mieux’s pillows were her condolences, kept nearby like pets whose silk purrs when stroked, or her stashes of grass that comfort when smoked with their smoke.
Skizzen really had no room or time or inclination to record the assaults of man upon his environment, as deadly as his pacifications. How busy we are with our days: felling forests, shaving hills, overgrazing, overfishing, setting fires, and causing floods, drilling, mining, bringing fresh infestation to local flora and native fauna, polluting the earth and air with fire and water; and how deserved will our pain be when our host rebels, and we do return to dust or slide into the sea. The professor would sometimes crumple a helpless strip of such reportage into a pill of futile rage. I will enjoy it. I must. Justice at last … in the form of rust.
I am your judge, he would believe during rarer moments, you are not mine—not mine—not mine—and with his inquisition scheduled he needed to collect righteousness like provisions for a voyage; for what would happen to him when they tossed him out, homeless and poor, into the very cruel and soiling world he had tried so valiantly to avoid?
1915–1923. It is estimated that roughly 1,500,000 children, women, and men were deported to their death by the Ottoman Empire. Those missed by the first sweep were later kicked out of their houses. The Turks claimed the Armenians started it. Young Turks took advantage of the First World War to massacre 275,000 Assyrian-Chaldeans and hundreds of thousand of Greeks. In 1938–39 Turkification was completed with the removal of 65,000 Kurds and a scattering of Jews.
1932–1933. As if stealing a page from the Brits vis-á-vis the Irish, the Russian government confiscated an entire harvest in the Ukraine causing 7 million to die nationwide. I especially like the name for this solution: the Holodomor. Ukrainian fields were borrowed by the NKVD in 1940 as sites for the murder of 20,000 Polish officers at Katyn (in the same fashion that the Germans were exhibiting elsewhere). Chechens often enjoyed the attention of Russian executioners. Future archaeologists will be able to find bones almost anywhere they shove a shovel.
Skizzen had recently read that a famous fellow named Bertrand had confessed: “Sometimes, in moments of horror, I have been tempted to doubt whether there is any reason to wish that such a creature as man should continue to exist. It is easy to see man as dark and cruel, as an embodiment of diabolic power, and as a blot upon the fair face of the universe.” No, Russell. Russell, it turns out, is unable to persevere in this judgment.
GERM WARFARE. Japanese Unit 731, operating between 1932 and 1945. The germ inflicts people with rotting-leg disease—ulcerous sores that killed between ten and twelve thousand of Chinese prisoners, and later three hundred thousand to five hundred thousand civilians. I have labeled it rare and little known in modern times, but one of the triumphs of my researches.
These days. Backed by the USA, the Pakistan army, according to a customarily conservative scholarly estimate, killed, during 1971 alone, one and a half million Bengali citizens of Bangladesh, who happened to have an unpopular religion. Elites were the favored target. Germans also picked on Polish intellectuals and after killing both of them (the joke ran) turned their attention to washerwomen. The wounded are never counted as carefully as the dead, but it has often turned out that being wounded was the worse affliction.
On many cards, Skizzen had entered no more than a place-name and a date, intending to get back to those notes later with the estimated sum of each subtraction and to pencil in his personal comments. The work was routine but numbing. On the back of a card, he would occasionally paste a photograph of corpses looking like heaps of laundry, piles of skulls with their wide black eyes, or vaguely located mass graves and other places from which human consciousness has fled. Bodies that have been left out in the rain appear especially soggy and therefore more lifeless, as are the limbs, wet hair, and cotton blouses when examined separately. In winter one doesn’t need to hurry with any interment. If, on the other hand, graves are not dug deeply enough, the ground is likely to heave as the bodies rot.
Skizzen repeatedly fingered through the cards, pulling one out and then, after a glance, pushing it back in place again as if looking for a specific entry; but his fingers had a case of the nerves, and his eyes were possessed by a series of startled blinks, while moisture had begun dampening his goatee. Might he be jailed? Would they dare do that? Or would they be satisfied if he quietly disappeared. A flick, a wave, begone, strangely beset man. Isn’t that what you say when, after the play, you find a ghost still mooning about on the stage? He saw his mother’s few belongings swept into the back of a truck … to be delivered where? at whose expense? There, too, was his mother, squatting among her pots and trowels, scowling at the sky, bidding bye-bye to her … well … life’s work … Suddenly, to be forced to leave her palace of petals, as she was fond of describing it, and, most mornings, her so lovingly cultivated pearl-wet leaves … It was too painful. What moment of realization might finally overcome her, so that her tears could extinguish her anger?
Oh, good heavens, he’d forgotten. He had Debbie to deal with. Debbie lived nearby. Surely Debbie would take her mother in … She’d enjoy having her mother near. They could both watch Debbie’s pebble grow beyond rock to boulder. Perhaps Miriam could take up a little gardening at the farm. At the farm they grow potatoes underground like so many of the dead. Though potatoes’ eyes are multiple and small, their skins do resemble a mummified head.
What a stupid thing to think. Debbie might enjoy her mother’s company now and then, watching her make goo-goo eyes at the tot, and Miriam might like to hoist the kid up into her hug, proud she can do it, proud she is a grandma, proud of her kin; but not, no not, as a regular thing, like every morning before breakfast, before five in the bloody morning when these
folks were inclined to get up, outrising the sun, no not as a daily, hourly occasion, moment-by-moment event, like tick begets tock, until a hungry growth on Grammy’s arm appears, one you can see swell when her heart beats blood through the swelling.
Skizzen admonished—he cautioned—he lectured himself. Skizzen, he advised, should concentrate on the good years he had enjoyed. Skizzen, he realized, had finally become comfortable in the classroom. Skizzen, he confessed with some pride, had improved the record collection. There were now two versions of Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. The college no longer used the mimeograph. While he lived, Carfagno treated him like royalty. Skizzen had his own office, he admitted, with a window that framed a view of the chapel and the quad, pretty as a postcard: all this from a building made of limestone scrap and healthy ivy. Skizzen, the professor, no longer scorned the rituals of conferring degrees or laughed at the happiness that graduation brought to parents. Skizzen, he had to draw the conclusion, was A-OK.
Fate had it in for him. It would grin—to suggest “not yet”; it would wink—falsely to promise “coming soon”; it would lead him to suppose success was as slow to release its sweet as a caramel in his mouth, he had but to wait—not yet—coming soon—only to find his sweet turn tacky each touch of his tongue; to find each succeeding moment rough. Although his first weeks at the High Note had been a bit awkward, he had adjusted finally, absorbed his duties, and had begun to enjoy the store’s piano. He was swimming in music; he heard glorious voices; he saw melody in the movement of the light. Then the carrothead had set him up, Joey was certain. Castle Cairfill had plotted a plot and made Mr. Kazan suspicious. Cairfill’s musical tastes were deplorable. Joey was free of blame, although his taste, then, rose no higher than the “Moonlight Sonata.” Despite his superiority in every particular, his opponent had won that round. There hadn’t been another, had there?
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