Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  He was interrupted by a crescendo of howling police sirens and rushed back to the window. Ten stories below, cop cars were racing in from two opposite directions and the operation had the intensity of a commando raid.

  “The cars slammed to a stop and the boys in blue burst out of them, some running into the apartment house, others around the sides. I jumped to Esther’s phone, telephoned the network to ask Réjean to come over double-quick with his camera, and was told that Réjean had left half an hour ago. I watched for a long time and finally I saw the cops leaking out of the building, climbing into their cars, blasting off with their sirens, and driving off. ‘Another coitus interruptus,’ I said to Esther, and she told me she was going to make some tea.”

  While Esther was in the kitchen, Timothy watched the shadow of Mount Royal float down over the roofs and through the streets to the river. Lights had come on in the high buildings. Lights were shining from the upper windows of the hotel where the big-shots were sheltering and Timothy wondered if governments can really believe it when the wars they plan actually start. “To press the button that starts a war – my God, it must be the biggest thrill a man can know. But to press the button that starts a revolution” – Esther came in and his subconscious turned off. She poured him a cup of tea and he sipped it.

  “This is good tea,” he said. “How come you prefer English-style tea to European?”

  “The minister they captured is going to be murdered,” she said.

  “Balls,” he said.

  “There’s a terrifying personality in the cell that took him and when the police find him – I have a horrible feeling he’ll turn out to be a man we’ve had on the show. If there’s a single agitator or fanatic who’s not been on our show, you name him. I remember this one and so do you. Him gabbling along about the moral necessity of kidnapping and political executions and you nodding your head as though that kind of talk was perfectly normal. I still can’t understand how our show survived that performance. Or should I say, your show?”

  “It’s survived because they can’t do without us. That’s why it survived.”

  “If you and I are going to continue working together, we’ve got to agree on a few fundamentals.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as getting this program back to where it was before you turned it into an ego trip.”

  “There goes that damned gritty Jewish conscience again. All the way back from Washington all I could think about was how much I loved you. Why the hell aren’t we in bed together instead of going on like this? What’s come over you, Esther?”

  “Reality, perhaps.” Esther never gesticulated. She never shouted. “I’m guilty as much as you are. It was once so lovely I tried to pretend it would continue lovely.”

  He tried to laugh. “Let’s cool this. Let’s just a little cool this down. This so-called crisis – what does it amount to? The government will behave like they all do. Act stubborn and then surrender. They’ve made it clear they’re looking for a deal. So what’s going to happen? The cells will release the hostages. The government will fly the boys down to Cuba and after a few years everyone will forget about this and they’ll return as patriots and heroes. But the moment they reach Havana – listen Esther – you and Réjean and I are going to fly down there and come back with a tape that’ll go all around the world.” He crossed the room, put his finger under her chin, and lifted it. “Know what I want to do above everything else? Not just spend a little time in bed with you but a whole night inside of you so we can keep waking up and start all over again.”

  She brushed his hand away. “Who gave you the idea that a woman likes to be used for a command performance? Now you listen to me for a change. If the government surrenders, this whole city will blow apart. There are people, Timmie, people you and I don’t know, who’d find it very profitable if this whole country collapsed. What are you trying to do – dream yourself into insanity?”

  He turned back to the window and stared in silence down at the city.

  “I was as tight as a high-tension wire after she said that, for I knew she was right. To do my kind of work I had to be in extrasensory perception with what was around me. I didn’t have to understand it. I just had to feel it, so maybe I was close to insanity. I saw the city’s lights coming on and the beacon revolving on the top of the Cruciform and I felt invisible waves coming to me out of the city. I felt the hatreds compressed by three centuries of religion quivering down there like an agitated jelly, but this time the jelly wasn’t edible, it was gelignite. The city where the System had so quickly turned half the population into non-persons. How many unknown, despised, exploited, frustrated, forgotten, and overlooked people down there must be singing hosannas in their souls now that the Establishment was scared pissless! La Métropole – voilà la faiblesse! So at last a handful of young men, nobody knew where they came from, they had found the path to the powder magazine of Métropole. Unseen and with precision – my God, and with such beautiful haughtiness – they had moved out of the Great Barrier Reef of unidentified humanity to plant the bomb, to seize the hostages, then had faded back unseen into the Barrier Reef from which they were hurling their ultimatums like conquerors. The non-persons of every Metropole in the world! The Dark People of Russia who rose when Lenin took another city nine wars ago! Esther was right. It could happen here. It was happening here. And I was here to record it.”

  He heard Esther’s voice behind him. “Do you remember how long you’ve known me, darling?”

  Her voice was so sad and gentle that it broke his mood.

  “During all these four years have you ever seen me scared?” she said.

  “Are you scared now?” His voice had become gentle.

  “So scared I was sick to my stomach last night. Literally.”

  “Have I got anything to do with that?”

  “If you’ll sit down I’m going to try to tell you something I’ve never told to anyone. Not even to my own parents, though they found out about it. Give me a cigarette, will you?”

  He gave her one and lit it for her. She seldom smoked and she never asked for a cigarette unless she needed it.

  “Don’t be hurt by what I’m going to say now. It won’t do anyone any good if you’re hurt by it.” She paused. “Has it ever occurred to you that you have no mercy?”

  He winced. “You mean I’m a sadist, or something?”

  “Of course I don’t mean that. I said you have no mercy. That’s because you never found out what mercy is. I’m not criticizing you.”

  He rolled over on the sofa with his head on his forearms. “Go ahead.”

  “I know you’ve had an unhappy life. You’re compulsively sorry for other people – lately for those who don’t deserve it. Feeling sorry has nothing to do with mercy. Mercy isn’t pity or feeling sorry for people. It’s something nobody will ever understand unless he’s had to beg for it. It’s something that doesn’t exist unless you’re absolutely helpless in somebody else’s power.” Her hint of a smile was strange and distant to him. “Maybe Jews were born understanding what mercy is. Some of us are the most arrogant and proud people alive. Some of us are everything that goy Jew-haters claim we are. But I don’t think there’s a Jew alive, not even the worst, and that’s saying more than you can possibly guess, who can’t at least imagine what mercy is because there’ve been so many times we’ve found out that it wasn’t worth while even begging for it. Last night I couldn’t sleep.”

  He was still lying face down with his head on his forearms.

  “That poor man they captured. He was twice on our show and you’ve not even given a thought to him. We had him only a month ago. Thank God you didn’t try to cut him up. But he was French and you didn’t. If he’d been English–. A middle-aged man with a wife and family. A proud man. A brave man who has known much about fear. Tied up, possibly gagged. Starved, maybe. Wherever that man is, he knows that his only hope is mercy and I don’t think he’s going to find it.”

  Timothy rolled over
and sat up. “You’re letting your imagination run away.”

  She made no reply, and looking at his watch, he saw they would soon have to leave for the studio. He also noticed that her eyes were closed. Was she as tired as that or was she simply intense? He remembered suddenly that she always had closed her eyes when she made love to him.

  “Something cracked wide open inside of me and I remembered it and felt it again, the first time we made love, and it was not the fall of the year but the spring, one of those wonderful prematurely hot days we sometimes get in the middle of May. Never had I dreamed that so grave a girl could turn herself into what she became that night. It was a total union if only for a few seconds as the impossible happened and at last I was joined with a woman who loved me for myself and I understood what love is. This serious girl from the real world I had never known, this girl my family would have been lethally polite to, she was loving me for my own sake. The ancient history in her genes had judged me and found me adequate. The strength and acceptance of so many pilgrimages into so many destructions, into so many revivals, had emerged out of the centuries and I knew their power in her hard, imperious groin and the coiling of her muscles, and at the onset of a climax that must have shaken the room, suddenly she cried out: ‘This is – now!’ and just as her essence left her and entered me, and mine left me and entered her, in this most incandescent instant of my entire life what had to happen? My miserable mind bounced right back into the old jail and I thought, ‘This is now? My God, the perfect title for my show!’”

  In more moderate prose Timothy recorded that in literal truth it was a perfect title for his show and a few days later he told her how and when the idea had come to him and promptly felt guilty because he had offended her, Esther having hoped that this moment might also have been a different kind of climax in her own life. Under the title This Is Now, Timothy not only had far more material than he could even hope to use; he did not even have to understand it or interpret it. In those years most of the people who worked in the media were obsessed by what they called “happenings,” and Timothy decided to base his show on nothing else but happenings. The one consistent line he trod was to use the happenings to make the Establishment look as bad as possible – something that in retrospect strikes me as redundant if not completely absurd. As Esther used prayerfully to ask him, what was the Establishment anyway? Anyone over forty? Anyone who had achieved something? Anyone who was not ashamed to use the word “duty”? Uncle Conrad, I remember, believed that the real danger in those years was that there was no real Establishment at all. Anyway, Timothy recorded that while he lay in Esther’s arms he saw a cataract of program material flooding through his mind.

  “I saw it all. My show could be a mirror of Now and there was no limit to the material Now could furnish me – drugged teenagers proving how moral they were to hate the politicians and their own parents; college presidents caught with their pants down; a victimized postman with seven children on inadequate welfare; a police captain almost certainly on the take; paroled convicts telling us what our jails are like; homosexuals and lesbians demanding proper respect; scientists, other journalists, generals, admirals, airmen, union leaders, pop musicians, whores who had written their autobiographies; politicians galore – all of them would jump at the chance of selling themselves to the public through me, and that would put them in my power. It’s a matter of record that Now as I conceived and executed it proved inexhaustible. I even interviewed Bertrand Russell in England and he was so right, and so wrong, and so great, and so silly, and so wise, but above all he was kind to me and gave me the feeling that he was grateful because, though I reverenced him, I sensed the terrible contradictions he had had to live with for nearly a century. Without uttering a single overt remark, he made me know that he understood the chaos of my personal life and that we each felt pity for the other, and for the same reason.

  “So on our first night together, silent in a white peace, I watching Esther intently as her eyes came slowly open and her strong face grew soft and radiant, I knowing that for the first time in my life I had brought someone into a state of ecstasy, her now-tranquil body gave a tiny frisson. Out of her hands as she caressed my skin I felt a vast and healing tenderness flow over me. Both of us were as silent as a country night.

  “But soon afterwards my mind got busy again and I saw my program coming alive. I saw how I could use tricks with the lighting and shadows, how I could program the camera angles to make any kind of impression I desired without my victim even suspecting I was doing it. How I could edit with musical sounds, something like this – a politician speaks his punch-line and at a signal from me, a tuba player in the wings makes a noise like a farting horse. I saw also how I could fortify the satire and gain credibility with sincere, solid presentations of genuinely valuable people, how contrapuntally I would be able to display the multiple insanities of Now’s outrageousness to people, plants, animals, and all living creatures so that the public would have to stare at it, stare at it as I myself had stared at it helplessly for years, yes stare and stare at it so that I, Timothy Wellfleet, who had never before had a chance to do anything he wanted to do, with this Jewishly-wise woman beside me could become the Master of Now.

  “So the dream was imprinted on my mind and I left it there for the time being. That night between sleeping and waking we made love till the robins woke us, and in the dawn and the pallor of sexual exhaustion, both of us naked, each with an arm about the other’s waist, we knelt in the warm air before the open window and looked out over the roofs and through the gaps between the high buildings while the rising sun soared up like the song of a trumpet out of the eastern plain and poured itself across the river into the city.

  “She whispered with her tawny-gold hair loose and her head turned away, she whispered, ‘I have something I must tell you.’

  “‘Yes, darling?’

  “‘I love you.’

  “‘I love you.’

  “‘I’m in love with you.’

  “‘I’m in love with you.’

  “She paused and said very quietly, very sadly, ‘But I can’t marry you.’

  “My arm tightened about her waist, my hand caressed the wonderful, opulent curve of her hip, and I, too, looked away, looked at that vast red sun lifting itself off from the horizon. She turned my face toward hers and surveyed me with a sweetness and gentleness I had never seen in a girl’s face at any time since I was a child and Stephanie was there. But in Esther’s eyes there was a look of fatality.

  “‘It’s not that I don’t love you, darling. I’ll always love you, I think. But I can never marry you.’ Then she looked away and for an instant I thought she was crying. ‘Why did it have to happen like this?’

  “‘Because I’m a gentile?’

  “‘It’s cruel,’ she whispered. ‘More cruel on me than on you. Timmie, my beloved, why weren’t you born a Jew?’ Then she kissed me with open lips but very gently. ‘So of course this gives you your freedom. I’ll be here when you want me, but you’re free.’

  “‘I don’t want that kind of freedom,’ I said.”

  Now, three years later in her apartment, he wondered if things might have turned out otherwise if she had not spoken those words to him and meant them. He asked himself if it was really this strange rejection that had made him so reckless and driven him on without even looking where he was going, as though he had to fight tiger after tiger of his own invention in order to stay sane. She was sitting in an armchair with her eyes closed. He watched her open her eyes and the moment became trancelike.

  “I’ve decided to tell you at last,” she said. “I don’t want to, but this much I owe you. If it wasn’t for what’s happening now I’d never have told you.”

  “Whatever it is, tell it.”

  Her voice came quietly, “When we first made love, you of course discovered that I was not a virgin.”

  Her mysteriousness was getting under his skin and making him irritable. “Did you think I’d expect any normal
girl over seventeen to be a virgin?”

  “Quite a few are. However, I’m trying to talk to you about mercy.”

  “I remember you saying I don’t have any.”

  “I didn’t say that. All I meant was that you don’t understand what it is. Did you think –” her voice was shy, “that first lovely night we had together, did you think I might have begun when I was barely fourteen?”

  “Great violinists begin when they’re seven. That could explain why you’re so terrific at it.”

  “Am I terrific at it?”

  “Lots of men must have told you so.”

  He did not make her angry. Instead she smiled gently. “I know you pretty well, Timmie, and I know you didn’t mean what you just said. Only one man ever told me what you told me and it was you. I remember thanking you and saying that if it was true, it was only because I loved you. Yes, I do have to tell the rest of it now.” She looked away and her voice became almost impersonal. “Would you mind looking somewhere else than at me for the next few minutes?”

  The trance in the room deepened. During an instant’s silence he heard the distant wails of two different police sirens and estimated they were at least three miles apart. More than two and a half million people down there, increasing all the time, and a social scientist appearing on his show a month previous had offered, as his contribution to scientific knowledge, that in the city as a whole, an orgasm occurred on the average of every six and a half seconds.

  Meanwhile Esther was talking in the detached voice of somebody reading aloud a newspaper column:

  “It was a summer evening in the old street where we lived and a sickle moon was in the sky. I was one day over fourteen and I kept looking at the moon and thinking how nice it was that the moon was growing, too. I was thinking how much I loved my father for so many reasons, but also because he had called me Esther who was my favorite woman in the Bible. My father was so gentle, and he had never complained about having to live in a street like ours.