Clearly this was what was happening to the Timothy I was watching on the screen with Uncle Conrad. Knowing as I did what both of them felt about Mother, knowing that she was the only human being Timothy had ever loved and respected without reservation, I found myself a witness to one of those spectacles that wound and shock because they are so unspeakably clumsy, like street accidents.
Timothy’s tense, baffled expression showed something close to panic as his gaze shrank away from Uncle Conrad and settled on Chalifour, a type which at that period might have emerged out of any city in the world between Los Angeles and Frankfurt. This is how Timothy described him:
“Chalifour was sprawling back in calculated, sullen insolence, his face three-quarters hidden by a shrubbery of unkempt hair with still more hair dripping over his shoulders and a semicircular moustache bushing out around a rosebud mouth. A medallion hung by a chain over a black shirt open at the neck, and a cigarette was in the corner of his mouth. He was skinny, with little muscular development, and the lower part of his body wore the uniform of his kind: a pair of not too clean, hip-hugging jeans carefully frayed at the cuffs and sold in the stores at five times more than a genuine workman would have paid for the real article. There he was, the perfect image of the fashionable bourgeois revolutionary against nothing more important than himself. But this was a judgment I dared not make aloud to anyone, because it might have applied equally well to me.”
“Monsieur Chalifour,” he began, “this morning I was in Washington interviewing an American general about the Viet Nam War and when I came back I found the whole city uptight about this so-called kidnapping crisis. In comparison to Viet Nam it looks pretty trivial to me. But what would you say?”
“It’s not trivial.”
“Do you approve of kidnapping for political purposes? It’s not been done in the States, you know, though there are millions of protesters down there.”
“The United States is a huge imperialist power. Quebec isn’t. Quebec is an occupied territory. In an occupied territory, political kidnapping is not only legitimate, it’s the only course left open to a people who are systematically treated like white niggers …” and so on and so on.
This surprised Timothy; he had expected Chalifour to play it much safer. He sat back and let Chalifour continue in an angry, sullen voice as though he were repeating a litany. More than twenty patriots were in prison, some of them for life. Their only crime had been to meet force with the self-respect of men who refuse to accept any longer a hundred years of injustice. It was the government that was treasonous, not the patriots. The government was nothing but a stooge of the imperialist corporations. The patriots had been too gentle for their own safety. Three times they had postponed the executions of the hostages and still the government would not move. Every postponement increased the danger that the police would track them down – and so on for another minute.
“Do you believe these execution threats are serious?”
“Don’t you?”
Even in the hysterical mood of that time, this was strong stuff for anyone to deliver over the networks. Timothy looked scared for a moment and turned to Uncle Conrad.
“Professor Dehmel, you are a scholar of some reputation, I understand. Would you agree that the kidnapping – even the execution – of hostages is a legitimate weapon for revolutionaries who believe they are saviors of their people?”
“I would not agree. Neither, I think, would you.”
“You don’t have to put words into my mouth, Professor. However, you’ve said what I expected you’d say. One of your students told me you said in a lecture that the toleration of political kidnapping would reduce any society to the level of feuding Mafia families. You did say that, didn’t you?”
A rueful smile from Uncle Conrad. “So a student remembered something I said! But if that’s all he told you, he forgot other things I said. In the fourteenth century …”
“We’re not discussing the fourteenth century, we’re discussing the here and now. Many people – Monsieur Chalifour is one of them – believe the freedom fighters had no other choice.”
“They have been told that, of course. Older people – men who are using them – they have certainly told them things like that. Perhaps even some of their professors used such language to them. There was a famous book we used to read when I was young – La Trahison des Clercs – ‘The Treason of the Intellectuals.’ What’s happening here is not a new phenomenon, but if it continues long enough the results will be as they always are. Some intellectuals have much to answer for.”
“Did these kidnappings surprise you?”
“I predicted them a year ago.”
“And you stand by your statement that the Liberation Front is a Mafia?”
“I will not stand by a statement I never made. You know as well as I who are the Mafia. But these young men have been told that it is heroic, that it serves freedom, to kidnap and threaten to murder innocent people. I am an historian, and let me tell you that a crime is a crime, and crimes committed in the name of freedom are especially vile because they turn freedom upside down. That is to debauch a virgin.”
Chalifour was twitching with fury and Uncle Conrad turned and said to him quietly, and with a smile, “Monsieur, I know you would never kill a man in cold blood. But please call things by their proper names. Don’t make murder legitimate by calling it execution.”
Chalifour’s nostrils almost gesticulated. He smirked, spread his hands apart, puffed cigarette smoke out of his nostrils, smiled like a cat, and said, “Oh God, what next do I have to hear?”
Dehmel looked straight at him. “When I first came here this country was still innocent. Its people were kind and trusted each other. But look at it now! The same old sick propaganda. The same exploitation of paranoia by experts in paranoia. Even here, with the example of Europe before us, there is a desire among some people – and I wonder who they are? – to ruin our country and to use adolescents as their instruments to do so.”
Again the twitch of the nostrils and the cat smile from Chalifour. “Did I hear you say your country?”
“I said that because I am a citizen of it.”
Another cat smile. “And how long have you been a citizen, Monsieur le Professeur?”
“Ten years.”
“Oh-la-la – my ancestors came here three hundred and thirty years ago and have suffered repression for two hundred and seven years.”
Dehmel shook his head and smiled gently. He said, “I accept that you have longer territorial rights than I have, but let me remind you that all of us are citizens of the same world.” He looked from Chalifour to Timothy. “Both of you are far too young to know what it was like in Germany before the Nazis came to power. Well, let me tell you that there are symptoms here, there is language here, that I have heard before. There’s not a former European living in this city who wouldn’t agree with me.”
“An interesting comment, Professor,” Timothy said suavely. “So now you come right out with it and compare people who belong to Monsieur Chalifour’s movement to the Nazis.”
“You are twisting me, Mr. Wellfleet.”
“Am I?”
Now Uncle Conrad was looking at Timothy with a quick shock of recognition.
“Nazi is a very dirty word, and so it ought to be. Hitler made it so. He ruined an entire generation of Germans. He could not have succeeded had not the atmosphere been so charged with propaganda, and the governments too weak and timid to enforce their own laws.” He turned back to Chalifour. “Monsieur, let me tell you something else. French is my second language, not English. I have many French-Canadian friends. I know their history and how difficult it has been. But I say this, and I think you know it, that only a handful of people in this province are happy about what is happening now. And I do not accept that a handful of frustrated intellectuals have the moral right to produce chaos because it’s a quick way to increase their self-importance.”
Chalifour broke out furiously, “What kind o
f chaos do you think our patriots are suffering in prison? Now you call them Nazis. If you’d ever been in prison yourself, and seen what it does to a human being …”
Uncle Conrad smiled grimly. “But I have been in prison. And bad though our prisons here may be, they are paradise compared to the one I was in.”
The effect of this remark on Chalifour was extraordinary. Like many of the local intellectuals, he was very partial to Europeans and assumed they all shared his opinion of Anglophone North Americans.
“If you had said that in the first place, Monsieur le Professeur,” he said with respect in his voice.
“There is seldom anything heroic about being in prison, unless you have accepted it as a moral choice. For me it was a terrible experience. There was no honor in it.”
“But it gives you a certain right,” Chalifour said, shifting his eyes to Timothy, “which other people have not earned.”
Timothy realized that the program was being taken away from him. Not only was it getting nowhere, Uncle Conrad was dominating it. The suavity that made some viewers think of a coiled snake returned to his manner and he spoke with thoughtful deliberation.
“Professor, I suppose you know some separatists. Would you call them idealists?”
“The only ones I have met are students and yes – they are idealists.”
“You were a young man in Germany when Hitler took over. Were the young Nazis also idealists?”
When Uncle Conrad was laboring to make a point he was blind to a trap.
“That is one of the things I particularly came here to speak about. Yes, very many of the young Nazis were idealists, and of course nobody can be more easily manipulated than a young idealist. Well do I know it. I was young myself. The young are always the easiest targets for cynical politicians, especially for revolutionary politicians.”
Timothy continued smoothly, “Professor, you are not in your classroom. Monsieur Chalifour and I are not your students – neither is the audience. We have heard all this before. The next thing you’ll be telling us is that this is a Children’s Crusade.” His voice suddenly turned hard with contempt. “I’ve read some of the things you’ve written in the papers, and I think I’m right to believe that you think the separatists should be suppressed by force.”
“I do not accept that statement as you make it.”
“You’re hedging.”
Uncle Conrad gave Timothy one of those looks of his I well remember. “Let me ask you a question. Do you believe a democratic government has the right to make laws?”
“Naturally, but –”
“If it has the right to make laws, do you deny it the right to enforce them?”
“A very convenient way of dodging, Professor. Has our government ever had a law on its books that was not in the interests of the Establishment?”
“That’s nonsense and you know it. To kill an innocent man is murder, and that’s the law I was referring to.”
Timothy shifted his attack. “I’ll say this for you. You’re certainly telling us where you stand. Recently you wrote an article comparing the separatists to Nazis and some time before you wrote a letter to the press supporting the authorities of one of our universities when they turned the police against black students.”
Uncle Conrad took a handkerchief and wiped sweat off his forehead. He hesitated.
“Well?” said Timothy with a mocking smile.
“In the first place, Mr. Wellfleet, it is clear that you never read my article, because I most emphatically did not compare the separatists to Nazis. I compared some of the wild propaganda and emotions here to similar propaganda and emotions in Germany when I was young. So much for that. As for the affair of the black students, it had nothing to do with the separatist movement, but the causes of it were very similar. Immature instructors who dislike the Viet Nam War almost as much as I do – they inflamed those students because at the moment it is popular to make riots in universities. They made paranoiacs of some of them and in the end the university was nearly burned down. If it had been burned down, some of those students would have died.”
“How very convenient to dismiss black students as paranoiac because they object to how they are treated here!”
Uncle Conrad lifted his hands and dropped them. “Is it really necessary for you to misunderstand me deliberately? They were students, period. Teachers, I think, should take what I call the Socratic Oath. It means this, that they betray their duty if they use their knowledge for any purpose but the students’ good, and the test of what is good is simply respect for the truth.”
“You have yet to answer my question about the Nazis.”
Uncle Conrad sighed, then shrugged his shoulders. “By now I thought that everyone knew about the Nazis, but apparently you don’t. What is important to understand is why they became Nazis – why Hitler’s propaganda was so successful with the young. Everyone knows the political and economic explanations, but the deeper cause is often ignored.” He took a deep breath and his face became very concentrated. “After the 1914 war, religion died out among millions of young Germans. This left a void in their lives and many turned to nationalism as a substitute for the religion they had lost. In the 1960s, religion also died out among the young all over the world and nationalisms of every kind are taking its place.” He held up his hand as Timothy was about to interrupt. “Now understand this – because all Nazis were nationalists, it does not follow that all nationalists are Nazis.”
Timothy looked at him with contempt, faced his audience, and said, “And now we will pause for this message.”
The three panelists vanished from the screen and were replaced by a young man in a turtleneck sweater who displayed four sleek automobiles one after the other, caressing their hoods with the palm of his hand as though they were the bodies of naked women, and ending with a half-smile and half-snarl, “Why don’t you fit your ego into one of these beauties?”
The cameras burned again and Timothy took over.
“Professor, you’ve been singing a pretty familiar song. Law and order – the American story in Viet Nam. Order and law. I think the time has come to get down to a rather important question” – a lethally quiet smile and a lilt in his voice – “were you ever a Nazi yourself?”
Uncle Conrad answered his smile and shook his head.
“You’ve told us that many young Nazis were idealists. Were you also an idealist when you were young?”
Again Uncle Conrad smiled. “Oh, I suppose so. I was certainly immature.”
“And Nazi?” Timothy had snapped the words out, and now he was studying the older man with the expression of a judge who has found out a perjurer. “I have some reason to believe that you were a Nazi, Professor. And a very active one.”
At last Timothy had succeeded in getting under the older man’s skin. Uncle Conrad sat up very straight in his chair and there was indignation and contempt in his expression.
“Just what are you trying to imitate here, Mr. Wellfleet? Senator Joseph McCarthy? A police inquisition in a totalitarian state?”
Timothy later recorded that this did it. Up to that time he had not really intended to go the whole way, but when he heard himself compared to McCarthy and the police the adrenalin pumped solidly into his nervous system. He reached into his pocket and took out the slip of paper he had recovered from his files before the program began. It had been given to him by Jason Ross and he knew how Ross had obtained it. He had broken into Conrad’s study in the university with a party of activist students and had ransacked the filing cabinets. The paper Timothy now unfolded had been taken, as I later discovered by inference, from one of Conrad’s diaries. Timothy studied it, then looked up and surveyed Uncle Conrad coldly.
“Does the name Hanna Erlich mean anything to you?”
Whether Uncle Conrad flushed or turned pale I don’t know, because at that moment Timothy had signalled his floor crew to alter the lighting and the camera angles. The effect was dramatic. Suddenly, Conrad Dehmel became another kind of
person, and to an innocent viewer it would appear that this had happened because Timothy’s question had unmasked him. He looked harsh, hard, cruel, and utterly ruthless. I saw him make a convulsive movement and grasp the arms of his chair.
His voice cracked. “Where did you get that paper?”
“It was given to me.”
“By whom was it given to you?”
Timothy handed the paper over the table. “Do you recognize your own handwriting?”
Conrad put on his glasses, glanced at the paper, and looked up in dismay. “This paper was stolen. It was torn out of its context. It was –”
“I have asked you a question. Does the name Hanna Erlich mean anything to you?” He paused, searched Conrad’s face, and added softly, “I think it does.”
Conrad pulled himself together and the floor crew, sensing that something was wrong, made the lighting normal again.
Conrad said, “Men who had to live through the times I lived through should be allowed the decency of some personal privacy. This – this paper” – it was lying on the table and he pointed at it – “this has nothing to do with the purpose for which you invited me here.”
Voices in Time Page 17