Charlotte and I were at school when Uncle Conrad was killed and his death made no sense whatever. Charlotte was an unfeeling girl and she said, “Oh hell, it was just one of those things. Maybe somebody mistook him for somebody else.”
How appalling it is for me, a man older than Conrad Dehmel ever lived to be, to discover only now that Charlotte, without knowing the first thing about what she was talking about, was probably right.
For Mother, Conrad’s death was an appalling thing and it almost broke her. Literally, she turned her face away from the world and this meant that she lost all control over Charlotte and me. Or is even this accurate? For we two were already going along with the wave. Charlotte had her first boy when she was barely fourteen, which was not unusual then, except that in her case the boy was a married man of forty-two who knew Mother, had tried to make her and got nowhere, then had turned to Charlotte as easier pickings. How unusual was that? André would be shocked at it, and now I am not so much shocked as horrified at it. This man, whoever he was, left Charlotte as soon as he got tired of her and she told me afterwards she was grateful to him because – the words are hers – “He was a first-class sexual technician, and he taught me so much that now the boys can’t get enough of me.” About six months after my twin was launched I had my first girl, and neither of us were sexual technicians. We were two scared, clumsy kids who thought we’d be out of it if we didn’t start. Soon random sex became a habit with me like cigarettes. Charlotte and I knew we were hurting Mother and only now do I understand that she was far more sexual in nature, profoundly so because of her love of children, than either Charlotte or I could ever be. But she was too old-fashioned to talk to us much about sex. It had never occurred to her that we would go on the town in our teens.
I loved Mother. I truly did, but I was too young to understand how precious she was. Charlotte’s behavior to her seemed to me at the time atrocious. I remember Mother looking at her in shocked despair – or was it the plain, honest contempt of a naturally great lady? – and saying: “So the serpent said to Eve as he coiled around the branch, ‘Don’t worry, little girl. I have the pill in my mouth and you can do anything you like. Look at me,’ said the serpent smiling, ‘in my mouth is the pill.’”
All Charlotte could do was to shrug and say, “For God’s sake grow up, Mummy. I know what I’m doing. I’m safe as a boy.”
Mother said sadly, “If only you did know what you’re doing!”
She looked so wounded we both felt ashamed and guilty, but guilt was out of fashion for our generation so we became defiant and angry. We told each other it wasn’t our fault if the world Mother had brought us into was not a world to her taste, or one that didn’t give a damn what a woman like her thought about anything. There was a general feeling that our parents’ generation had squandered the right to teach their children anything in the way of morals, and this explains why Timothy’s program was so popular.
Yet I wonder now, indeed have wondered for years, just how much I myself squandered of the drive created by juvenile curiosity by satisfying while still a small boy what to a growing youth is the supreme curiosity. Without intending to, Charlotte and I made Mother feel that her entire life had been futile. When we were very young she had never lost her temper with us; she had been firm, but her love for us was always clear and wonderful. It was different now. She began to quarrel with us, and especially with Charlotte. One day she really took off against Charlotte for the kind of life she was living, but Charlotte came right back at her. “You had your fun, Mummy, and you were careless. I’m having mine now and I’m being careful. That’s all the difference there is between us, so stop being self-righteous.”
Mother’s normally gentle face turned white and so stern I felt scared. But Charlotte glared right back at her.
“It wasn’t fun I was having,” Mother said, “I loved your father. When I knew I had conceived, even though it was only then that I was told there could be no marriage, I thanked God.”
Charlotte may or may not have been feeling ashamed. I neither know nor care what she felt. But I remember what she said.
“That must have been a great day for God,” she said over her shoulder and I felt like smacking her. But already she had stalked out of the room.
Now I am much older than Mother ever lived to be and it is an anguish to remember a scene like this. Poor Mother lacked the education to reason with us and this was her father’s fault. He was a lovely gentleman but he tried to ignore the twentieth century. He did not believe that girls should go to college and compete with men, but he did believe they should be trained to be thoughtful of others, to have good manners, and to know how to keep a house and rear a family. He would have had no trouble if he had been born three-quarters of a century earlier. No matter what Timothy said against his own father, if it had not been for Mother’s Uncle Greg, who bought Grandfather’s house, Mother and her parents would have been destitute. It was a huge happiness for her when she married Uncle Conrad and had a home of her own. Mother sat erectly and spoke and walked like a great lady who is also kind and she had no petty pride at all. More than once I noticed her looking at her hands. They were very small hands but they were marked by years of hard housework. “These two hands,” I remember her saying, “have nothing to be ashamed of. They have earned their living.”
Now she had neither husband nor home nor children who would let her care for them. After that developer destroyed her old home, she was reduced to a two-and-a-half-room apartment overcrowded with the antique family furniture she loved so much. And it was about this time that I did something pretty stupid, but I’m still proud that I did it.
I found out where that developer lived and one dark evening I rode out to the place on my bicycle. He lived in the most expensive area of the city, though hardly its best part, and he had one of those low-lying houses with huge windows they called ranch houses. This one was shielded from the street by a hedge that must have been at least two and a half meters high. The man had installed it fully grown and charged it off as a business expense.
There was nobody in sight, so I hid my bicycle in the hedge and crawled through to the other side and came out onto a wide lawn with a fountain in the middle of it and colored lights playing on the water. There was a blaze of light from those long, low windows and I walked up and looked in. A cocktail party was going on. About a hundred expensive-looking guests were standing around with glasses in their hands and servants in white jackets were shuffling through them refilling the glasses and passing trays loaded with canapés. I recognized the developer from his picture in the newspaper. He was standing near a big fireplace with artificial logs and pointing to a big oil painting that looked like an old master and may even have been genuine. I looked at his clumsy round face with round eyes and a mouth that also seemed round, and the worst thing about it was that it looked like a boy’s face that had gone bad. His hair was sleek and very thick and black and I noticed that his hands were abnormally small and dainty.
Next door to this property was a new construction site. He and his kind had been thumbing their noses for years at the zoning laws by the usual expedient of bribing officials, and if this didn’t work, they let loose batteries of lawyers against any citizens’ groups that tried to keep them out, and if that didn’t work, sometimes they hired arsonists to burn the place down. I went to the site and came back with two large stones. From a distance of only eight meters I threw them one after another through the window and the crash of the breaking glass was beautiful. It was nothing like so beautiful as the behavior of the developer and his guests. He and at least half of them dropped their glasses and fell flat on the floor and I saw some of them crawling like caterpillars to get behind the furniture. They must have thought a machine gun was going to open up on them. Then I remembered that this man was sure to have bodyguards and I didn’t wait any longer. I skipped back through the hedge, pulled out my bicycle, and pedalled down the nearest side street to the first lateral avenue below. No
body chased me and when I searched the newspapers the next day there was no mention of the incident. Men like that son of a bitch didn’t want to give other people any ideas.
I never told Mother about this because it would have upset her. If anyone had tried to enter her own house and there was a child in it, Mother would not have stopped at killing the man to save the child. But what I had done was an act of vengeance, and in her nature there was never any vengeance. But I’m still glad I did it. If a System won’t punish people who ruin others – well, as a lot of us put it then, to hell with the System.
Uncle Conrad had not worked long enough at the university to build up an adequate pension and living costs were rising at the rate of twelve percent a year. He had published many learned articles, but there had been no real income from these. Fortunately one of his books on the history of the Roman Empire remained in print. Later it even went into a paperback and shortly after his death enough people wanted to read it that they supplied Mother with a small income which at least kept her off welfare. She also got a job in a settlement house for orphans and the children adored her, but Charlotte and I had to be withdrawn from those two country schools. The feeling between Charlotte and Mother was now too bad to be mended and they seldom saw each other. Charlotte moved from one petty job to another and lived with a succession of boyfriends and this routine went on for nearly ten years until she shacked up with a pyschotic who strangled her. For myself, after throwing those rocks through the developer’s window, I finally began to behave better.
It was no grief for me to have to leave that boarding school. I had always detested it, and I now moved in with Mother and finished my last two years in a city high school and worked over the weekends to help out with the bills. I still made love to a few girls without really loving any of them and at home Mother’s sadness was like a weight on my chest.
There was one night I have never forgotten, for it accentuated her withdrawal from the world. I had come home late after spending the evening with a girlfriend and I found Mother in a chair, not reading or listening to music but just sitting there. Her face was young and radiant and when I came in she looked at me in that surprised way of hers.
“I’ve been daydreaming,” she said, and I asked her what about.
“It was that Christmas morning in your grandfather’s big house when all was well with us all. We children got up early for the tree, but your grandmother said, ‘No, you children must eat your breakfast first.’ And that’s what we did. After breakfast the whole floor of the living room was covered with the wrappings we took off our prezzies and everyone was so happy. But the best came after that. Your Aunts Rosalie, June, and Louise and I put on our warm clothes and sat down on a big toboggan with me in the front because I was the youngest and the smallest. Then we coasted down the hill with our arms full of presents for Granny. Granny lived lower down on the mountain. It was so lovely! The snow was pure white and the sun made the whole world glisten for the birthday of our Lord. It was the purest heaven.” Then her face clouded over and she looked older again. “Poor John, if only you could have been young in the years when I was young. If only you could have known how sweet life can be.”
I thought to myself, though I didn’t say it aloud, “Oh God, Mummy, please don’t think like that. There are so many exciting things if only you’d give yourself a chance.”
So there were Mother and I, two hopeless misfits in the international airport our world had become. I had always known that Uncle Conrad’s death had been a catastrophe for her, but it was only after reading his papers that I learned that quite possibly it was an even worse disaster for myself. I was naturally an eager student, though lazy and unsystematic because I found no stimulus in the teaching system. By the time I was twenty I’m sure I could have appreciated Uncle Conrad more than I did when I was a child. He might have given me some mental armor for what lay ahead, perhaps even some moral armor. Not many of us had either. In my last conversation with André Gervais I told him that there may never have been a time in the past five centuries when young people were as defenceless as in those very years when we were told that the young had never been so free. Perhaps we were, but nobody told us something that Uncle Conrad understood – that freedom has to be paid for and is the most expensive thing in the world.
Shortly before he died, Mother persuaded Uncle Conrad to write the story of his life and this I did not know because she never told me. That’s what she meant, of course, the time she cried out, “All our lives were in those boxes.”
At first Uncle Conrad refused to write his story because he did not think it would interest anyone and he was afraid that his training as a professional scholar would make it impossible for him to write in an intimate style. But Mother was a determined woman and she finally got her way. So here am I, more than half a century later, left with what he began and was not allowed to finish.
Conrad Dehmel has given me a much more difficult problem than I had with Timothy because some of the most important part of his story is written in German. I could speak German when I was young but had forgotten much of it. Fortunately I have a dictionary and a grammar and finally was able to translate it into English. In his methodical German way he had accumulated an arsenal of information in the form of notes, diaries, and personal letters. He had the scholar’s tendency to play down dramatic incidents, but at times the drama could not help getting the better of him. From the way he begins I think he intended this record solely for Mother’s eyes, but I can’t be sure even of that. At any rate, his opening is characteristic of the man I remember and no more professorial than he usually was in a relaxed mood. Now for a time I can sit back and let him speak for himself.
_________________
PART FOUR
CONRAD DEHMEL’S STORY
as told by himself
Dear Stephanie, you are probably the sanest person I ever met in my life, but forgive me if I mention that your kind of sanity reminds me of a French farm woman I was told about many years ago. In the early days of the First World War, this woman’s farm became a battleground. German trenches were on the east side of it, French trenches on the west, and her house was in the middle. She paid no attention to the war because this was her property. Every morning, regular as a clock, she opened the farmhouse door and waddled out to milk the two cows she had tethered in her field. German soldiers on one side of her and her cows, French on the other. The moment she appeared the soldiers on both sides rose from the trenches and cheered her. They knew she was saner than they were and a genius of sanity compared to the politicians and generals who had sent them there. But as soon as she returned to the house with her milk pails they jumped back into the trenches and began shooting at each other.
Every time I remember that woman I feel like a fool. I have always had to ask the question “Why?” and now after all these years I ask myself what good that question does for anyone in a time like ours. And when I tell you this, I know you are too sure of yourself to pay any attention to it.
When I first arrived in America, I came to the United States from a ruined and disgraced Germany, came at a time when most people believed that merely to have been born a German was to have been born into a state of original sin. I had expected to find a new world. Instead I found one that was doing its best to grow old without taking the trouble to grow up. Well, I’ve already told you why I had to leave the States.
When I arrived in this country I knew hardly anything about it and after a few months it began to bewilder me. It was like a palimpsest written over by authors who all contradicted each other and generally seemed uninterested.
Innocence, dear Stephanie, is a lovely quality, but to retain it too long is to live beyond your moral income. You may not believe this, but the Germany I grew up in used to be innocent. “The famous German honesty” was very real and that is why Hitler was able to make himself our master. The French, the English, and the Italians have never been innocent in this way. Right up to the end of the war,
when all was lost and everyone knew it, young German soldiers obeyed orders without question and fought, battle-drugged, to the last cartridge. For what? To buy time for the war criminals to escape with their lives and their loot.
If I speak of innocence with bitterness it is because, oddly enough, it can make a man too arrogant for his own safety. It did that to me when I was young, and I had much less excuse than you people have here. This century has been relentless to everything an innocent person values. The strange creatures who have bred in the rottenest parts of our woodwork are quite possibly our real controllers today. The true international underworld is not composed of gangsters but of brilliant men, few of them with police records, none of them attractive in themselves. But I tell you, some of them have the I.Q.s of genius. As the great man after whom I was named once wrote, they have kicked themselves loose from the earth and now they are kicking the earth itself to pieces.
Remember Switzerland, Stephanie? Orderly, Zwingli-Calvinist Switzerland? Remember her with her beautiful lakes in her beautiful mountains resting rich and calm on a solid foundation of organized crime? And some of the characters who have gone to earth there – do you remember them with their lizard faces chauffeured around in der Schweiz in their Mercedes and Rolls-Royces, and in their hooded eyes did not you yourself read the question they will never be able to answer? How long? How long before I’ll have to find another refuge for my money? How long before some investigation in another country finds my record and names me? How long before the cancer arrives? How long before the kidnappers come for my children and grandchildren? How long before they come for me?
Voices in Time Page 19