Cold, contemptuous, pretending to make an effort to control his moral indignation, Timothy looked away and addressed the unseen audience.
“Hanna Erlich committed the crime of being a Jew and for this she was sent to the gas chambers by the Gestapo.” Then he turned and pointed his finger at Conrad, “And if it had not been for you, this would not have happened. Because, Herr Professor Dehmel – if that is your real name – I have good reason to believe that you yourself were once a member of the Gestapo and that it was you who caused the death of this woman.”
Conrad lurched forward in his chair. “Young man, you are doing a terrible thing here. Somebody has used you to do it. Such a thing, it should not be mentioned in public like this. You have no idea what you’re saying. Who told you this terrible lie? To say that I was responsible for that woman’s death – oh, what is the purpose of this? Hanna Erlich! Poor Hanna!”
He stopped with tears in his eyes. Then he rose and with a quiet and desperate dignity he made a short bow.
“I will leave you now. Perhaps I can bring myself to forgive you later, but for the present I call you a creature beneath contempt.”
He walked off the set.
To leave a television set before the time was up was something that just did not happen. By doing so, Uncle Conrad ripped the mask off the program and left it naked and indecent. Timothy had almost ten more minutes and had nobody to work with except Chalifour, who now had come to detest him. However, Timothy virtually turned the show over to him and Chalifour talked in a vacuum about the separatist movement until the show ended with both of them sweating.
For what followed I have depended on Timothy’s notes written some time later.
“The overhead lights went out and I said, ‘Good man, Emile. You saved the show. At the end you were great. It was all yours.’
“But Chalifour was staring at me in rage, ‘Shit la marde, but you’re a bastard!’
“What are you talking about, Emile?”
“You’re all the same. Even when you pretend to be on our side you’re all the same. I could be arrested for tonight.”
“Cool it. Nobody’s going to arrest you.”
“Calvaire, why didn’t you tell me what kind of a man this professor is?”
“For Christ’s sake, you’ve seen for yourself what kind of man he is.”
“I’ve seen for myself what kind of a man you tried to make him look like. What were you trying to do to him?”
“I wasn’t trying to do anything but get the truth out of him. He may have conned you, but he didn’t con me. Pompous old bastard.”
“You were using me. You damned English, you use everybody.” He lit another Gitane. “That man’s been in prison.”
“How do you know he wasn’t in prison for war crimes? Didn’t you hear me say he was in the Gestapo?”
“How do you know he was?”
“I know, all right. I also know that twenty-four of your friends are in prison and this professor would like to keep them there.”
Chalifour shrugged and Timothy also lit a cigarette.
“Oh, to hell with that professor. Tell me something, Emile – do you really think those hostages are going to be executed?”
Chalifour stared at him in cold suspicion. “How would I know that?”
“It was just a question.”
“Then you can answer it yourself. Every maudit one of you is the same.”
“What the hell do you mean talking to me like that? I give you space on one of the biggest programs in the country and you –”
“You sucked me in and used me. And now I’m going to be arrested.”
Chalifour got up and left without saying good night. After spending a few minutes with the floor crew, who were reserved with him as they had never been before, Timothy joined Esther in the control booth. Her face was white.
“Well,” he began, “now I suppose you’re going to say that the show was lousy. At least we took on this big-deal crisis of yours.”
She did not answer.
“Oh well, the Pentagon show will make up for it. That professor of yours was impossible. Is it my fault he was impossible?”
Without looking at him she said, “Go home and take a Seconal and go to sleep.”
“Esther, what in hell is the matter with you today? Can’t I do anything right?”
She looked at him as though for the last time. “Go home and swallow anything that will close your mouth and keep it closed for at least eight hours. Then come back here and play that tape over and have a good look at it. You’ve done plenty before, but tonight – there just are no words.”
He left and went out into the street cursing her, for he was professional enough to understand that what he had just done might easily ruin his career forever. He felt like crying in despair. He began walking and suddenly felt a desperate need to urinate. He saw a narrow blind alley, entered it, and emptied his bladder against the closed door of a run-down and abandoned building at the end. After he had finished and was walking away, he realized that the building against which he had urinated had once been a garage.
_________________
PART THREE
CONRAD DEHMEL’S STORY as told by JOHN WELLFLEET
At this point I am going to leave Timothy for a while, not because his story is ended, but because I have brought him to his first and only encounter with Conrad Dehmel, an almost accidental meeting that was to have terrible effects on us all.
Again it is early June. My seventy-sixth birthday is coming and this year we had a good spring, with the lilacs a week earlier than usual. It is true what the scientists predicted when I was young – that the climate would grow colder, but it has been much less cold than they said it would be and in these parts as erratic as ever. When we least expected it, lovely weather came in the middle of May and it is still here. It is so beautiful that I’m afraid it will turn cold again in August. And another thing has made me happy. André and his wife now have a little boy and they let me play with him.
From where I sit I can see the backs of those three old men and I wonder without interest what they’re talking about. The last time it was about sex and they were telling each other that the young of today – they never meet any, of course – know nothing about it. The oldest of them is in his eighty-third year and he still smokes grass. He even cultivates a patch of the stuff near by. For a long time he has been in his second childhood and he lives entirely in the past – so far back that he’s always talking about the great days when he was leading student demonstrations and parading around the streets carrying his placards. “Did I ever tell you about the time,” I’ve heard him say a hundred times, “when we made the president of the university crawl under his desk and the President of the United States shit his pants?” He was born in the old United States and came up to this northern country to escape the military draft in that war that Timothy was so excited about. He insists he’s going to live past ninety because both of his grandparents lived that long. What became of his father and mother he neither knows nor cares, but he still has enough energy to hate them and to blame them for what went wrong with his own life, which was just about everything, even before the real troubles hit us all.
I’m also watching a robin on the same patch of grass and wondering whether he is the same one I watched last spring or one of the little ones that were fed in the lilac bush. The chipmunk that used to come to my hand has disappeared and I don’t know whether he was taken by a prowling cat or died in hibernation. I miss him. Though it was cruel cold in January and February, my health was better than it had been in years and my only complaint was an annoying arthritis in the left wrist that made typing painful when the weather was harsh. It’s gone now, with the warmth.
It is just over a year since André turned these papers over to me and the people I have met in them are as real as any I have ever known. I was too young to have been involved in their time on the stage, but it was in the last years of their world that I became
what is known legally as a man. I wonder if they sensed that they themselves were symptoms of what was going to happen to us all? It seems to have been automatic with people like Timothy to hate their elders and to put them down on every possible occasion, but I and my friends didn’t feel that way. Now I can better appreciate the enormousness of the tragedy implicit in André’s question about Conrad Dehmel last year – “If there were men like him with all that knowledge, why couldn’t they stop what happened?”
Among Dehmel’s notes I found this passage and it was written several years before he appeared on Timothy’s program:
“In the relatively rare periods in the past that we call civilized, people understood that a civilization is like a garden cultivated in a jungle. As flowers and vegetables grow from cultivated seeds, so do civilizations grow from carefully studied, diligently examined ideas and perceptions. In nature, if there are no gardeners, the weeds that need no cultivation take over the garden and destroy it.” Then followed a sentence that seemed to me quite terrible, even though I must ask myself whether it is true or not. “During my lifetime too many of the men who thought of themselves as civilization’s gardeners, in nearly everything they did from the promotion of superhuman science to superhuman salesmanship, devoted the ambiguous genius of their programmed brains to the cultivation of the weeds. They watered them with the jungle rains of the media. The klieg lights of the studios were their hothouses. They did what they did, and they still do it, with the best of intentions, because they cannot believe that the creative energy of the universe will never interfere with human ingenuity. If anyone said to them, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me,’ they would reply with a polite and pitying smile.”
Is this overloaded? Had I read it fifty years ago I would have thought so.
But what of André Gervais and the small coterie of his friends? I cannot claim really to know them, merely to delight in them and in the way of an old man to love them. They feel sure that a time will come when human beings will be let alone to follow their own bents, to be joyful and adventurous, to entertain gracious thoughts and be responsible for their own actions and the work of their hands. They are discovering entirely on their own the excitement of moral philosophy. They are marvellously, beautifully ignorant of what men are capable of when they grow disappointed, sour, tired, or merely indifferent. Can they really succeed in ignoring the miserable remnants of the present Bureaucracy, which is the feeble descendant of the Second Bureaucracy, which in turn was the blindly barbarous successor of the Smiling Bureaucracy which controlled us when I was a boy? They are amateurs. They are sure that in time a bright new city will rise on the ruins of Metro. All I can say to them is God bless you, I hope you’re right. All I can say to myself is that they have nothing to lose by trying; for we, without trying, lost everything.
Again, there is this notion of André’s that there is a growing passion for books among the young people now. I suppose it’s possible. But the poor boy cannot grasp the magnitude of what has been lost. He can’t understand that the middle-aged of today, including his own parents, were worse casualties than I was, for they had no experience of anything before the Great Fear.
But to return to the books – and here I’m speaking only to myself. So many million tons of printed matter had been accumulated and stored away even before I was born that nothing short of the destruction of the entire planet could have obliterated all of it. So far as I know, most of the city libraries went up in flames. Even before that, the Second Bureaucracy had processed vast quantities of printed matter for fuel and animal foods. Certainly some books survived these holocausts. I was lucky enough to have saved many of my own books; luckier still to have found and collected several thousand others. I used to pick them up in odd places when I was still young enough to wander and when no authority was strong enough to care about me. One of the most precious of them all has been a magnificent encyclopedia in a single large, heavy volume. I know it almost by heart. But I still must ask myself how many of the young people will have André’s enthusiasm and will want to read books.
André told me – I had not known it – that a few years ago circulating libraries began to appear and that there was one close to where I live. I visited the place and it was pathetic. I don’t know what some of the others are like but this one reminded me of a library I had seen long ago in a small-town Sunday school where the shelves were crowded with a mishmash of books cast off by summer tourists or picked up from farmhouses after the old people had died. I saw a Gideon Bible, probably recovered from a rural hotel. Gulliver’s Travels was there, and a battered collection of Shakespeare’s plays, but the rest was junk. The young woman in charge was proud of the place, but when I asked her how she liked Shakespeare she told me she couldn’t understand the language. I was trying to think of something tactful to say when she asked me if I had heard of a book called The Idiot by an author with a peculiar name she could not pronounce. The room nearly spun around. So Dostoyevsky had survived! The man who had foreseen so much of what was going to happen after his death was still with us!
“Where did you find The Idiot?” I asked her, and she told me that one of her friends had lent it to her. She did not know where her friend had found it and she had not liked the book well enough to read more than a few chapters. Her only comment was that it seemed a very queer book written about very peculiar people.
I was not surprised to learn that this was the only novel she had ever seen, for the Second Bureaucracy had been animated by a ferocious logic of the very kind Dostoyevsky had been the first to describe and understand. Unlike previous tyrants, they had not worried about ideas, knowing that there were so many ideas of all kinds floating around that they were bound to cancel each other out. But novels deal with individual lives, and they had hunted them down and destroyed them as though they were carriers of a plague.
To be fair to André, by no means all the surviving books were commonplace. The Destructions and their aftermaths were just as unselective as those ancient barbarians we read about in school who plundered the old Roman Empire. André and his friends were very lucky, for they possess some beautifully illustrated books and commentaries about the art and architecture of the old Italian Renaissance. God knows where they were found, but originally they belonged to a private library. When André showed them to me I even recognized the name of the owner written on the flyleaf. I think he was a friend of my grandfather. Possibly his children sold them when they had no money left.
André asked me if I would agree that he and his friends are beginning a second Renaissance, and what could I say to that? With all respect and affection for him, I can’t see my young friend as a second Leonardo. Conrad Dehmel used to describe the original Renaissance as a mutation, and mutations are supposed to take centuries. Truly I can’t estimate what is going on now or even guess what it will amount to. But I’m sure of one thing. Any rebuilding that will occur is not going to resemble the gigantic reconstruction programs of the cities of Germany and Japan after the world war that ended before I was born. The same technological system that destroyed them was able to rebuild them in record time. There is no system like that today. No power like that.
Often when I lie in bed unable to sleep, trying to understand what I am too old to understand, it comes to me that André and his friends now in their mid-twenties are younger in spirit than I was when I was eight years old. When I was a boy nothing seemed really new to me, none of the big events at all surprising. The famous moon landing, for example. Our whole school watched it on television but there was no element of surprise in that show. We all knew that if the Control had not been certain of success it would never have risked it. As for information, there was so much of it that we all seemed to be living in an international airport with nobody knowing anyone else and loudspeakers barking thousands of directions in several different languages twenty-four hours a day. Well, that’s all past now, and André’s hopes are yet to come. The time is overdue to return to Conrad
Dehmel.
“For years I lived like a man in the jaws of a shark” – this sentence I found among Dehmel’s notes and thought to myself, “So what is new?”
However, it was certainly a new idea to me to discover that when he was alive I knew hardly anything important about him except that he was my stepfather. I was much too young to know such a man, and my sister and I were away at schools in the country for most of the short time he and Mother lived together. I liked him well enough, though I thought he could be pretty ponderous at times. My sister Charlotte disliked him intensely, and ruined every attempt he made to be her friend.
For instance, the day she came home with a second-hand guitar and Uncle Conrad was so pleased.
“Why Charlotte,” he said beaming, “you never told me you liked music. This is splendid. Let me get you a violin and arrange for you to take lessons.”
As if a girl like Charlotte had any intention of spending hours a day learning a tough instrument like the violin! Looking back on that sister of mine she really comes out as the Bitch Original and how Mother produced anyone like her I never could understand. As we used to say, it must have been in the genes somewhere. But again I must return to Conrad Dehmel.
When he was murdered we thought it was because of the crazy politics in our city at that time, but even I doubted if this was the real explanation. Politics were crazy everywhere, because the world was going out of control. The same story day after day all over the world – kidnappings, hijackings, skyjackings, hit men, individual kooks blasting off with submachine guns on street corners, eminent people and unknown people dropping dead for no reason the doctors could explain, several new strikes every week, money losing its value year after year, arson incorporated as a recognized technique in the building industry, arson a pastime for sexually frustrated individuals, organized crime the second-biggest industry in the richest and most powerful nation in what we called – Christ, what a word for it! – the Free World. We took all this for granted and it was marvellously exciting. Through it all the Smiling Bureaucracy continued to smile whenever they appeared on the screens.
Voices in Time Page 18